ded lions, stealthily put out from beneath their wrappers; the marble
lineaments of busts on pedestals, fearfully revealing themselves through
veils; the clocks that never told the time, or, if wound up by any
chance, told it wrong, and struck unearthly numbers, which are not
upon the dial; the accidental tinklings among the pendant lustres, more
startling than alarm-bells; the softened sounds and laggard air that
made their way among these objects, and a phantom crowd of others,
shrouded and hooded, and made spectral of shape. But, besides, there was
the great staircase, where the lord of the place so rarely set his foot,
and by which his little child had gone up to Heaven. There were other
staircases and passages where no one went for weeks together; there were
two closed rooms associated with dead members of the family, and with
whispered recollections of them; and to all the house but Florence,
there was a gentle figure moving through the solitude and gloom, that
gave to every lifeless thing a touch of present human interest and
wonder.

For Florence lived alone in the deserted house, and day succeeded day,
and still she lived alone, and the cold walls looked down upon her with
a vacant stare, as if they had a Gorgon-like mind to stare her youth and
beauty into stone.

The grass began to grow upon the roof, and in the crevices of the
basement paving. A scaly crumbling vegetation sprouted round the
window-sills. Fragments of mortar lost their hold upon the insides of
the unused chimneys, and came dropping down. The two trees with the
smoky trunks were blighted high up, and the withered branches domineered
above the leaves, Through the whole building white had turned yellow,
yellow nearly black; and since the time when the poor lady died, it had
slowly become a dark gap in the long monotonous street.

But Florence bloomed there, like the king's fair daughter in the
story. Her books, her music, and her daily teachers, were her only real
companions, Susan Nipper and Diogenes excepted: of whom the former, in
her attendance on the studies of her young mistress, began to grow
quite learned herself, while the latter, softened possibly by the same
influences, would lay his head upon the window-ledge, and placidly
open and shut his eyes upon the street, all through a summer morning;
sometimes pricking up his head to look with great significance after
some noisy dog in a cart, who was barking his way along, and sometimes,
w