at it.

A thin matron, in rusty black silk, very taciturn, with large, steady,
alarmed eyes, that seemed to look in your face, to read what you might
have seen in the dark rooms and passages through which you had passed,
was in charge of it, with a solitary "maid-of-all-work" under her
command. My poor friend had taken lodgings in this house, on account of
their extraordinary cheapness. He had occupied them for nearly a year
without the slightest disturbance, and was the only tenant, under rent,
in the house. He had two rooms; a sitting-room and a bed-room with a
closet opening from it, in which he kept his books and papers locked up.
He had gone to his bed, having also locked the outer door. Unable to
sleep, he had lighted a candle, and after having read for a time, had
laid the book beside him. He heard the old clock at the stairhead strike
one; and very shortly after, to his alarm, he saw the closet-door, which
he thought he had locked, open stealthily, and a slight dark man,
particularly sinister, and somewhere about fifty, dressed in mourning of
a very antique fashion, such a suit as we see in Hogarth, entered the
room on tip-toe. He was followed by an elder man, stout, and blotched
with scurvy, and whose features, fixed as a corpse's, were stamped with
dreadful force with a character of sensuality and villany.

This old man wore a flowered silk dressing-gown and ruffles, and he
remarked a gold ring on his finger, and on his head a cap of velvet,
such as, in the days of perukes, gentlemen wore in undress.

This direful old man carried in his ringed and ruffled hand a coil of
rope; and these two figures crossed the floor diagonally, passing the
foot of his bed, from the closet door at the farther end of the room, at
the left, near the window, to the door opening upon the lobby, close to
the bed's head, at his right.

He did not attempt to describe his sensations as these figures passed so
near him. He merely said, that so far from sleeping in that room again,
no consideration the world could offer would induce him so much as to
enter it again alone, even in the daylight. He found both doors, that of
the closet, and that of the room opening upon the lobby, in the morning
fast locked as he had left them before going to bed.

[Illustration: _These two figures crossed the floor diagonally, passing
the foot of the bed._]

In answer to a question of mine, he said that neither appeared
the least conscious of his pre