stener's imagination.

The story is supposed to be written or related by the chief actor in the
occurrences arising out of the "Haunted House." The author has thrown
the narrative into this form, as he hopes it will vary the style of the
traditions, and probably give more character and interest to the events
here detailed than they would retain if told by a third person.

The coach set me down at the entrance to a long and unweeded avenue. A
double row of beech-trees saluted me, as I passed, with a rich shower of
wet leaves, and shook their bare arms, growling as the loud sough of the
wind went through their decayed branches. The old house was before me.
Its numerous and irregularly-contrived compartments in front were
streaked in black and white zig-zags--_vandyked_, I think, the fairest
jewels of the creation call this chaste and elegant ornament. It was
near the close of a dark autumnal day, and a mass of gable-ends stood
sharp and erect against the wild and lowering sky. Each of these
pinnacles could once boast of its admired and appropriate ornament--a
little weathercock; but they had cast off their gilded plumage for ever,
and fallen from their high estate, like the once neatly-trimmed mansion
which I was now visiting. A magpie was perched upon a huge stack of
chimneys, his black and white plumage rivalling the mottled edifice at
his feet. Perhaps he was the wraith, the departing vision of the
decaying fabric; an apparition, insubstantial as the honours and
dignities of the ancient and revered house of----!

I looked eagerly at the long, low casements: a faint glimmer was
visible. It proceeded only from the wan reflection of a sickly sunbeam
behind me, struggling through the cleft of a dark hail-cloud. It was the
window where in my boyhood I had often peeped at the town-clock through
my little telescope. There was the nursery chamber, and no wonder that
it was regarded with feelings of the deepest interest. Here the first
dawnings of reason broke in upon my soul; the first faint gleams of
intelligence awakened me from a state of infantine unconsciousness. It
was here that I first drank eagerly of the fresh rills of knowledge;
here my imagination, ardent and unrepressed, first plumed its wings for
flight, and I stepped forth over its threshold into a world long since
tried, and found as unsatisfying and unreal as the false glimmer that
now mocked me from the hall of my fathers.

A truce to sentiment!--I came hit