e of Henry VIII., or earlier, and added to from age to age since
then, until now it presented an irregularity and incongruousness of
plan which rendered it an interminable maze of delight to us children
wandering through it. We were taken in charge by the children of the
family, of whom there were no fewer than fourteen, all boys, with only
twelve years between the eldest and the youngest (some of them being
twins). Hide-and-seek at once suggested itself as the proper game for
the circumstances, but no set game was needed; the house itself was
Hide-and-seek House; you could not go twenty feet without getting lost,
and the walls of many of the rooms had sliding panels, and passages
through the thickness of them, and even staircases, so that when one
of us went into a room there was no predicting where he would come out.
Finally they brought us to a black, oaken door with a great, black
lock on it, and bolts at the top and bottom; it was near the end of a
corridor, in the oldest wing of the building. The door, in addition to
its native massiveness, was studded with great nails, and there were
bands of iron or steel crossing it horizontally. When we proposed
to enter, our friends informed us that this door had been closed one
hundred and eighty years before and had never been opened since then,
and that it had shut in a young woman who, for some reason, had become
very objectionable or dangerous to other persons concerned. The windows
of the room, they added, had been walled up at the same time; so there
this unhappy creature slowly starved to death in pitch darkness. There,
doubtless, within a few feet of where we stood, lay her skeleton,
huddled, dry, and awful in the garments she wore in life. Sometimes,
too, by listening long at the key-hole, you could hear a faint sound,
like a human groan; but it was probably merely the sigh of the draught
through the aperture. This story so horrified me and froze my young
blood that the fancies of Mrs. Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe seemed like
frivolous chatter beside it.

About the middle of September the Bennochs returned from the Continent,
and we made ready to transfer ourselves to the lodgings in Southport
which had been prepared for us. Bennoch, who was soon to meet with the
crucial calamity of his career, was in abounding spirits, and he told my
father an anecdote of our friend Grace Greenwood, which is recorded in
one of the private note-books. "Grace, Bennoch says," he write