windows, hung in festoons from the moss-covered sills.  The door had dropped from its hinges, and on one side of the front the boards had fallen off, so that I could see quite into the interior, where I noticed, with surprise, some furniture yet remained, though in great confusion, a broken chair and an overturned table being the most prominent objects.  Outside, the same disorder was manifest in the great farm-wagon, left standing where it had last been used, and the neglected out-buildings fast going to decay.  About the whole place there was an aspect of peculiar gloom, and the house itself stood on this bleak hill looking out over the lonesome landscape with a sort of tragic melancholy in its black and weather-beaten front.

Now such a sight as this is very rare in our busy New England, where everything is turned to advantage, and where the thrifty owner of a tenement too old for habitation is sure to tear it down and convert the materials of which it is built to some other use.  My curiosity was, therefore, at once excited regarding this place, and I turned to my uncle with an inquiry as to its history.

“It is a very sad one,” he answered,—­“so sad that it gives a terrible dreariness to this solitary spot.”

“Then I am sure you will tell me the causes which led to its desertion.  You know how much I like a story.”

My uncle complied with the request, and, as we wended our way home through the deepening twilight, related a series of strange facts, which, at the time, took a powerful hold on my imagination, and which I have since endeavored to group into a continuous narrative.

* * * * *

This house, now so forlorn, was once a neat and happy home.  It was built by a young farmer named James Blount, who went into it with his young wife when he brought her home from the distant State where he had married her.  For several years they seemed very prosperous and happy; then a heavy affliction came.  The healthy young farmer was thrown from his horse, and carried to his home only to linger a few terrible hours and expire in great agony.  Thus early in its history was the doomed house overshadowed with the gloom of sudden and violent death.

Every one was heartily sorry for the widow with her two little boys, and the people of the country-side did all that they could to cheer her loneliness and lighten her grief.  But, as I have said, she was a stranger among them, and she seems to have been naturally of a reserved disposition, preferring solitude in her affliction; for she so repelled their attentions, that, one by one, even her husband’s friends deserted her.  Then, too, her house was three miles from the nearest neighbor, and this was necessarily a barrier to frequent social intercourse.  She very rarely went into the village, even to church, and thus people came to know very little of her manner of life; it was only guessed at by those few acquaintance who, at rare intervals, made their way to the Blount farm-house.