n would have speedily cast off and forgotten, the sour
misanthrope passed a useless, cheerless, weary existence, to which death
must have been a welcome relief.

Matters were in this state with the morose and aged man--aged mentally
and corporeally, although his years were but fifty-eight--when Mr. Flint
made Mr. Jennings's acquaintance. Another month or so had passed away
when Caleb's attention was one day about noon claimed by a young man
dressed in mourning, accompanied by a female similarly attired, and from
their resemblance to each other he conjectured were brother and sister.
The stranger wished to know if that was the house in which Mr. Ambrose
Lisle resided. Jennings said it was; and with civil alacrity left his
stall and rang the front-door bell. The summons was answered by the
landlady's servant, who, since Esther May's death, had waited on the
first-floor lodger; and the visitors were invited to go up stairs. Caleb,
much wondering who they might be, returned to his stall, and from thence
passed into his eating and sleeping-room just below Mr. Lisle's
apartments. He was in the act of taking a pipe from the mantel-shelf, in
order to the more deliberate and satisfactory cogitation on such an
unusual event, when he was startled by a loud shout, or scream rather,
from above. The quivering and excited voice was that of Mr. Lisle, and
the outcry was immediately followed by an explosion of unintelligible
exclamations from several persons. Caleb was up stairs in an instant,
and found himself in the midst of a strangely-perplexing and distracted
scene. Mr. Lisle, pale as his shirt, shaking in every limb, and his eyes
on fire with passion, was hurling forth a torrent of vituperation and
reproach at the young woman, whom he evidently mistook for some one else;
whilst she, extremely terrified, and unable to stand but for the
assistance of her companion, was tendering a letter in her outstretched
hand, and uttering broken sentences, which her own agitation and the fury
of Mr. Lisle's invectives rendered totally incomprehensible. At last the
fierce old man struck the letter from her hand, and with frantic rage
ordered both the strangers to leave the room. Caleb urged them to comply,
and accompanied them down stairs. When they reached the street, he
observed a woman on the other side of the way, dressed in mourning, and
much older apparently, though he could not well see her face through the
thick veil she wore, than she who