this
honest seeming surface for the mysteries on which it stood?

We dwelt originally in the city; but at an early date we moved to a
beautiful house in a green dingle, musical with splashing water, and
surrounded on almost every side by twenty miles of poisonous and rocky
desert. The city was thirty miles away; there was but one road, which
went no farther than my father's door; the rest were bridle-tracks
impassable in winter; and we thus dwelt in a solitude inconceivable to
the European. Our only neighbour was Dr. Grierson. To my young eyes,
after the hair-oiled, chin-bearded elders of the city, and the
ill-favoured and mentally stunted women of their harems, there was
something agreeable in the correct manner, the fine bearing, the thin
white hair and beard, and the piercing looks of the old doctor. Yet,
though he was almost our only visitor, I never wholly overcame a sense
of fear in his presence; and this disquietude was rather fed by the
awful solitude in which he lived and the obscurity that hung about his
occupations. His house was but a mile or two from ours, but very
differently placed. It stood overlooking the road on the summit of a
steep slope, and planted close against a range of overhanging bluffs.
Nature, you would say, had here desired to imitate the works of man; for
the slope was even, like the glacis of a fort, and the cliffs of a
constant height, like the ramparts of a city. Not even spring could
change one feature of that desolate scene; and the windows looked down
across a plain, snowy with alkali, to ranges of cold stone sierras on
the north. Twice or thrice I remember passing within view of this
forbidding residence; and seeing it always shuttered, smokeless, and
deserted, I remarked to my parents that some day it would certainly be
robbed.

"Ah, no," said my father, "never robbed"; and I observed a strange
conviction in his tone.

At last, and not long before the blow fell on my unhappy family, I
chanced to see the doctor's house in a new light. My father was ill; my
mother confined to his bedside; and I was suffered to go, under the
charge of our driver, to the lonely house some twenty miles away, where
our packages were left for us. The horse cast a shoe; night overtook us
half-way home; and it was well on for three in the morning when the
driver and I, alone in a light waggon, came to that part of the road
which ran below the doctor's house. The moon swam clear; the cliffs and
mountain