When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far distant waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint itself with new force upon his perceptions.—­Read the sonnet, if you please;—­it is Wordsworth all over,—­trivial in subject, solemn in style, vivid in description, prolix in detail, true metaphysically, but immensely suggestive of “imagination,” to use a mild term, when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster.

All I want of it is to enforce the principle, that, when the door of the soul is once opened to a guest, there is no knowing who will come in next.

—­Our young girl keeps up her childish habit of sketching heads and characters.  Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in the drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons; but there is a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin of her drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run riot in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to read her thoughts.  This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at it honorably.

I have never yet crossed the threshold of the little gentleman’s chamber.  How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only guess.  His hours are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in the night, I see the light through cracks in his window-shutters on the wall of the house opposite.  If the times of witchcraft were not over, I should be afraid to be so close a neighbor to a place from which there come such strange noises.  Sometimes it is the dragging of something heavy over the floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,—­it sounds so like what people that kill other people have to do now and then.  Occasionally I hear very sweet strains of music,—­whether of a wind or stringed instrument, or a human voice, strange as it may seem, I have often tried to find out, but through the partition I could not be quite sure.  If I have not heard a woman cry and moan, and then again laugh as though she would die laughing, I have heard sounds so like them that—­I am a fool to confess it—­I have covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy in my dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that so-called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,—­a sort of fancy that she visited the little gentleman,—­a young woman in old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,—­not a necklace, but a dull stain.

Of course you don’t suppose that I have any foolish superstitions about the matter,—­I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take all that nonsense out of any man’s head!  It is not our beliefs that frighten us half so much as our fancies.  A man not only believes, but knows he runs a risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but it doesn’t worry him much.