The village clock struck eleven as I walked up the avenue that conducted to the house.  The day was intensely hot, and at that early hour the fierce fire of the sun had rendered the atmosphere sweltry and oppressive.  I knocked many times before I could obtain admittance, and, at last, the door was opened by a ragged urchin about twelve years of age, looking more like the son of a thief or a gypsy than a juvenile member of the decent household.

“Is Dr. Mayhew at home?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know!” he answered surlily; “you had better come and see;” and therewith he turned upon his heel, and tramped heavily down the kitchen stairs.  For a few seconds I remained where I was.  At length, hearing no voices in the house, and finding that no one was likely to come to me, I followed him.  At the bottom of the stairs was a long passage leading to the offices.  It was very dark, or it was rendered so to me who had just left the glare of noonday.  At the end of it, however, a small lamp glimmered, and under its feeble help I advanced.  Arriving at its extremity, I was stopped by the hum of many voices that proceeded from a chamber on the right.  Here I knocked immediately.  The voice of Dr. Mayhew desired me to enter.  The door was opened the moment afterwards, and then I beheld the doctor himself and every servant of the house assembled in a crowd.  The little boy who had given me admission was in the group; and in the very centre of all, sitting upright in a chair, was the strangest apparition of a man that I have ever gazed upon, before or since.  The object that attracted, and at the same time repelled, my notice, was a creature whose age no living man could possibly determine.  He was at least six feet high, with raven hair, and a complexion sallow as the sear leaf.  Look at his figure, then mark the absence of a single wrinkle, and you judge him for a youth.  Observe again:  look at the emaciated face; note the jet-black eye, deeply-sunken, and void of all fire and life; the crushed, the vacant, and forlorn expression; the aquiline nose, prominent as an eagle’s, from which the parchment skin is drawn as rigidly as though it were a dead man’s skin, bloodless and inert.  The wear and tear, the buffeting and misery of seventy years are there.  Seventy!—­yea, twice seventy years of mortal agony and suffering could hardly leave a deeper impress.  He is strangely clad.  He is in rags.  The remnants of fine clothes are dropping from his shrunken body.  His hand is white and small.  Upon the largest finger he wears a ring—­once, no doubt, before his hand had shrivelled up—­the property and ornament of the smallest.  It is a sparkling diamond, and it glistens as his own black eye should, if it be true that he is old only in mental misery and pain.  There is no sign of thought or feeling in his look.  His eye falls on no one, but seems to pass beyond the lookers-on, and to rest on space.  The company are far more agitated.  A few minutes