Mrs. Carwell was very much frightened, and now concluded that the child must have seen the same ghost that had just appeared to believe so; for the face, figure, and dress described by the child were awfully like Pyneweck; and this certainly was not he.

Very much scared and very hysterical, Mrs. Carwell ran down to her room, afraid to look over her shoulder, and got some companions about her, and wept, and talked, and drank more than one cordial, and talked and wept again, and so on, until, in those early days, it was ten o’clock, and time to go to bed.

A scullery maid remained up finishing some of her scouring and “scalding” for some time after the other servants—­who, as I said, were few in number—­that night had got to their beds.  This was a low-browed, broad-faced, intrepid wench with black hair, who did not “vally a ghost not a button,” and treated the housekeeper’s hysterics with measureless scorn.

The old house was quiet now.  It was near twelve o’clock, no sounds were audible except the muffled wailing of the wintry winds, piping high among the roofs and chimneys, or rumbling at intervals, in under gusts, through the narrow channels of the street.

The spacious solitudes of the kitchen level were awfully dark, and this sceptical kitchen-wench was the only person now up and about the house.  She hummed tunes to herself, for a time; and then stopped and listened; and then resumed her work again.  At last, she was destined to be more terrified than even was the housekeeper.

There was a back kitchen in this house, and from this she heard, as if coming from below its foundations, a sound like heavy strokes, that seemed to shake the earth beneath her feet.  Sometimes a dozen in sequence, at regular intervals; sometimes fewer.  She walked out softly into the passage, and was surprised to see a dusky glow issuing from this room, as if from a charcoal fire.

The room seemed thick with smoke.

Looking in she very dimly beheld a monstrous figure, over a furnace, beating with a mighty hammer the rings and rivets of a chain.

The strokes, swift and heavy as they looked, sounded hollow and distant.  The man stopped, and pointed to something on the floor, that, through the smoky haze, looked, the thought, like a dead body.  She remarked no more; but the servants in the room close by, startled from their sleep by a hideous scream, found her in a swoon on the flags, close to the door, where she had just witnessed this ghastly vision.

Startled by the girl’s incoherent asseverations that she had seen the Judge’s corpse on the floor, two servants having first searched the lower part of the house, went rather frightened up-stairs to inquire whether their master was well.  They found him, not in his bed, but in his room.  He had a table with candles burning at his bedside, and was getting on his clothes again; and he swore and cursed at them roundly in his old style, telling them that he had business, and that he would discharge on the spot any scoundrel who should dare to disturb him again.