Caleb Price, was not so valuable as
to plague the patron with many applications. It continued vacant
nearly the whole of the six months prescribed by law. And the desolate
parsonage was committed to the charge of one of the villagers, who
had occasionally assisted Caleb in the care of his little garden.
The villager, his wife, and half-a-dozen noisy, ragged children, took
possession of the quiet bachelor's abode. The furniture had been sold to
pay the expenses of the funeral, and a few trifling bills; and, save
the kitchen and the two attics, the empty house, uninhabited, was
surrendered to the sportive mischief of the idle urchins, who prowled
about the silent chambers in fear of the silence, and in ecstasy at the
space. The bedroom in which Caleb had died was, indeed, long held sacred
by infantine superstition. But one day the eldest boy having ventured
across the threshold, two cupboards, the doors standing ajar, attracted
the child's curiosity. He opened one, and his exclamation soon brought
the rest of the children round him. Have you ever, reader, when a boy,
suddenly stumbled on that El Dorado, called by the grown-up folks a
lumber room? Lumber, indeed! what Virtu double-locks in cabinets is the
real lumber to the boy! Lumber, reader! to thee it was a treasury!
Now this cupboard had been the lumber-room in Caleb's household. In an
instant the whole troop had thrown themselves on the motley contents.
Stray joints of clumsy fishing-rods; artificial baits; a pair of
worn-out top-boots, in which one of the urchins, whooping and shouting,
buried himself up to the middle; moth-eaten, stained, and ragged,
the collegian's gown-relic of the dead man's palmy time; a bag of
carpenter's tools, chiefly broken; a cricket-bat; an odd boxing-glove;
a fencing-foil, snapped in the middle; and, more than all, some
half-finished attempts at rude toys: a boat, a cart, a doll's house, in
which the good-natured Caleb had busied himself for the younger ones of
that family in which he had found the fatal ideal of his trite life. One
by one were these lugged forth from their dusty slumber-profane hands
struggling for the first right of appropriation. And now, revealed
against the wall, glared upon the startled violators of the sanctuary,
with glassy eyes and horrent visage, a grim monster. They huddled back
one upon the other, pale and breathless, till the eldest, seeing that
the creature moved not, took heart, approached on tip-toe-twice