of Angerana, the genius of
silence. There is something peculiar in the sound of a common voice in
a large house, filled with memorials of those who had lived in it, and
yet with no living sounds to break the dull heavy air, which seems to
thicken by not being moved. It appeared as if I had been suddenly thrown
into a region of romance, but my experiences were not pleasant. I wished
to escape to my own professional thoughts again, and desired to go to
bed.

I was accordingly, not without some efforts on the part of my
entertainer to prolong his stories, ushered into my bed-room--a large
apartment, hung with pictures, some very old, and some very new. Francis
put the candle down, and left me. It was not long before I was undressed
and under the bed-clothes; but not being sure about sleeping, I left the
candle burning, intending to rise and extinguish it when I found myself
more inclined to fall over into the rest I required. The old legends
began to pass through my mind, and I was engrossed with the spirit of
the past. Time makes poetry out of very common things, and then we are
to remember, what we do not often think of, that the most ordinary life
cannot be passed without encountering some incidents which smack of the
romantic. Nay, every man's life, as a bright gleam thrown on the dark
abyss which separates him from eternity, is all through a romance, in
the midst of that greater one, seen by us only as shadows--the negatives
of some positives, perhaps, witnessed by eyes on the other side. I
have always been tinged by something of the spirit of old Bruno,
that dreamer, whose most real realities were no other than umbery
forms--flakes of shadow--cast off by a central light from the real
objects, of which we are the mere shadowy representatives. All the
breathing, throbbing, active beings, who for two hundred years had run
along these narrow passages of the old house, and peered into half-open
doors, or out of the small skew-topped windows--danced, sang, laughed
and wept--died, and been carried out--were to each other as such umbery
things; and I, the present subsisting shadow, received them all into my
living microcosm, where, as in a mirror, they existed again, scarcely
less shadowy than before.

Somehow or another I could not get to sleep; not that I had any fears:
these were out of the question with me. My vigils were attributable to
a fancy, wrought upon by the recitals of the old butler, illustrated
by the very