Though this house was roomy and comfortable, as I have said, it was not, by any means, a handsome one.  It was composed of dark red brick, with small windows, and thick white sashes; a porch, too—­none of your flimsy trellis-work, but a solid projection of the same vermillion masonry—­surmounted by a leaded balcony, with heavy, half-rotten balustrades, darkened the hall-door with a perennial gloom.  The mansion itself stood in a walled enclosure, which had, perhaps, from the date of the erection itself, been devoted to shrubs and flowers.  Some of the former had grown there almost to the dignity of trees; and two dark little yews stood at each side of the porch, like swart and inauspicious dwarfs, guarding the entrance of an enchanted castle.  Not that my domicile in any respect deserved the comparison:  it had no reputation as a haunted house; if it ever had any ghosts, nobody remembered them.  Its history was not known to me:  it may have witnessed plots, cabals, and forgeries, bloody suicides and cruel murders.  It was certainly old enough to have become acquainted with iniquity; a small stone slab, under the balustrade, and over the arch of the porch I mentioned, had the date 1672, and a half-effaced coat of arms, which I might have deciphered any day, had I taken the trouble to get a ladder, but always put it off.  All I can say for the house is, that it was well stricken in years, with a certain air of sombre comfort about it; contained a vast number of rooms and closets; and, what was of far greater importance, was got by me a dead bargain.

Its individuality attracted me.  I grew fond of it for itself, and for its associations, until other associations of a hateful kind first disturbed, and then destroyed, their charm.  I forgave its dull red brick, and pinched white windows, for the sake of the beloved and cheerful faces within:  its ugliness was softened by its age; and its sombre evergreens, and moss-grown stone flower-pots, were relieved by the brilliant hues of a thousand gay and graceful flowers that peeped among them, or nodded over the grass.

Within that old house lay my life’s treasure!  I had a darling little girl of nine, and another little darling—­a boy—­just four years of age; and dearer, unspeakably, than either—­a wife—­the prettiest, gayest, best little wife in all London.  When I tell you that our income was scarcely L380 a-year, you will perceive that our establishment cannot have been a magnificent one; yet, I do assure you, we were more comfortable than a great many lords, and happier, I dare say, than the whole peerage put together.

This happiness was not, however, what it ought to have been.  The reader will understand at once, and save me a world of moralising circumlocution, when he learns, bluntly and nakedly, that, among all my comforts and blessings, I was an infidel.