ming curiosity concerning all those horrors and
criminal mysteries which appear from time to time in the public prints;
and the more horrible they were, the greater was her interest in them.
The evening, after all the work was done and there was opportunity to
give her whole attention to the subject, was the time selected by her
for the satisfaction of this curiosity; and it thus happened very
frequently that, when I made my appearance among the servants, they were
deep in the discussion of some murder, or mysterious disappearance, or
kindred matter. If the item under discussion happened to be fresh, the
boy Tim was delegated to search the newspaper and read therefrom every
paragraph bearing upon it, the remainder of the party listening intently
and open-mouthed as they sat in a semicircle before the blazing fire.
And if the item happened to be so stale as to have passed out of the
notice of the papers, the cook would recapitulate for our benefit its
leading features, together with any similar events or singular
coincidences connected with the case which might occur to her _memory_
at the moment. From the discussion of murders to the relation of ghost
stories is a natural and easy transition, and here Jane, the housemaid,
shone pre-eminent. She would sit there and discourse by the hour of
lonely and deserted houses, long silent galleries, down which misty
shapes had been seen to glide in the pallid moonlight, gaunt and ruinous
chambers, the wainscot of which rattled, and the tattered tapestry of
which swayed and rustled mysteriously; gloomy passages through which
unearthly sighs were audibly wafted; dismal cellars, with never-opened
doors, from whose profoundest recesses came at dead of night the muffled
sound of shrieks and groans and clanking chains; "of calling shapes, and
beckoning shadows dire, and airy tongues that syllable men's names on
sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses," until not one of the party,
excepting myself, dared move or look round for fear of seeing some dread
presence, some shapeless dweller upon the threshold, some horrible
apparition, the sight of which, Medusa-like, should blast them into
stone. Not infrequently the situation was rendered additionally
harrowing by the cook, who would suddenly interrupt the narrative, send
an icy thrill down our spines, and cause the unhappy Tim's scalp to
bristle even more than usual, by exclaiming in a low startling whisper:

"_Hark_! didn't you hear