Silence, meanwhile, grew more silent, and darkness darker.  I listened in vain for the rumble of a vehicle, or the dull clamour of a distant row.  There was nothing but the sound of a rising wind, which had succeeded the thunder-storm that had travelled over the Dublin mountains quite out of hearing.  In the middle of this great city I began to feel myself alone with nature, and Heaven knows what beside.  My courage was ebbing.  Punch, however, which makes beasts of so many, made a man of me again—­just in time to hear with tolerable nerve and firmness the lumpy, flabby, naked feet deliberately descending the stairs again.

I took a candle, not without a tremour.  As I crossed the floor I tried to extemporise a prayer, but stopped short to listen, and never finished it.  The steps continued.  I confess I hesitated for some seconds at the door before I took heart of grace and opened it.  When I peeped out the lobby was perfectly empty—­there was no monster standing on the staircase; and as the detested sound ceased, I was reassured enough to venture forward nearly to the banisters.  Horror of horrors! within a stair or two beneath the spot where I stood the unearthly tread smote the floor.  My eye caught something in motion; it was about the size of Goliah’s foot—­it was grey, heavy, and flapped with a dead weight from one step to another.  As I am alive, it was the most monstrous grey rat I ever beheld or imagined.

Shakespeare says—­“Some men there are cannot abide a gaping pig, and some that are mad if they behold a cat.”  I went well-nigh out of my wits when I beheld this rat; for, laugh at me as you may, it fixed upon me, I thought, a perfectly human expression of malice; and, as it shuffled about and looked up into my face almost from between my feet, I saw, I could swear it—­I felt it then, and know it now, the infernal gaze and the accursed countenance of my old friend in the portrait, transfused into the visage of the bloated vermin before me.

I bounced into my room again with a feeling of loathing and horror I cannot describe, and locked and bolted my door as if a lion had been at the other side.  D—­n him or it; curse the portrait and its original!  I felt in my soul that the rat—­yes, the rat, the RAT I had just seen, was that evil being in masquerade, and rambling through the house upon some infernal night lark.

Next morning I was early trudging through the miry streets; and, among other transactions, posted a peremptory note recalling Tom.  On my return, however, I found a note from my absent “chum,” announcing his intended return next day.  I was doubly rejoiced at this, because I had succeeded in getting rooms; and because the change of scene and return of my comrade were rendered specially pleasant by the last night’s half ridiculous half horrible adventure.

I slept extemporaneously in my new quarters in Digges’ Street that night, and next morning returned for breakfast to the haunted mansion, where I was certain Tom would call immediately on his arrival.