I venture up the stone staircase, although most of the finely carved balusters are gone, and the arch-stones have so slipped out of place that they seem to cling together by the will of Providence rather than by any physical law.  The stairs themselves, although of fine stone that has almost the polish of marble, are cracked as if an earthquake had tormented them, and worn by the tread of innumerable feet into deep hollows.  I reach a landing where a long corridor stretches away into semi-darkness.  The floor is black with dirt, and so are the doors which once opened into rooms where luxury waited upon some who were born, and upon others (perchance the same) who died.  A sound reaches me from the far-end of the corridor that makes me feel like a coward.  It is the raving of a madman.  How he seems to be contending with all the fiends of hell!  Sometimes his voice is so low, and the words crowd one upon another so fast, that the muttering is like the prolonged growl of a wild beast; then the mood changes, and the unseen man seems to be addressing an invisible audience in grand sonorous sentences as though he were a Cicero; and perhaps he may be, but as he speaks in patois his eloquence is lost upon me.  What a terrible excitement is in his voice!  How it thrills and horrifies!  And he is alone, quite alone in this dismal old house with the fiends who harass him.  This I learn from a young girl whom I meet at the bottom of the staircase.  She tells me that the man is only mad at the time of the new or the full moon (I forget which), and that his raving lasts but two or three days.  Then nobody ventures near him; but at other times he is quite rational and harmless.  He has left, however, upon me an impression more lasting perhaps than that of the old tottering staircase that threatens to close up every moment like a toy snake that has been stretched out.

Most of the old houses are entered by Gothic doorways, and the oak doors are studded with large nail-heads.  The locks and bolts are of mediaeval workmanship.  Sometimes you see an iron ring hanging to a string that has been passed through a hole in the door.  It is just such a string as Little Red Riding-hood (an old French fable, by-the-bye) pulled to lift the latch at the summons of the wicked wolf.  And what a variety of ancient knockers have we here!  Many are mere bars of iron hanging to a ring; but others are much more artistic, showing heads coifed in the style of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, serpents biting their own tails, and all manner of fanciful ideas wrought into iron.  In wandering about the dim old streets, paved with cobble stones, architectural details of singular interest strike one at every turn.  Now it is the encorbelment of a turret at the angle of a fifteenth or sixteenth century mansion that has lost all its importance; now a dark archway with fantastic heads grimacing from the wall; now an arcade of Gothic windows, with graceful columns and delicate carvings—­a beautiful fragment in the midst of ruin.