About midway between the entrance to the park and the Collingwood grounds, and fifty rods or more from the cross-road which the strange woman had taken on the night of the storm, stood a small stone building, which had been used as a school-house until the Shannondale turnpike was built and the cross-road abandoned.  After that it was occupied by one poor family after another, until the property of which it was a part came into the hands of the elder Mr. Tracy, who, with his English ideas, thought to make it a lodge and bring the gates of his park down to it.  But this he did not do, and the house was left to the mercy of the winds, and the storms, and the boys, until Arthur became master there, and with his artistic taste thought to beautify it a little and turn it to some use.

‘I would tear it down,’ he said to his neighbor, Mr. St. Claire, who stood with him one day looking at it, ’I would tear it down, and have once or twice given orders to that effect, but as often countermanded them.  I do not know that I am exactly superstitious, but I am subject to fancies, or presentiments, or whatever you choose to call those moods which take possession of you and which you cannot shake off, and, singularly enough, one of these fancies is connected with this old hut, and as often as I decide to remove it something tells me not to; and once I actually dreamed that a dead woman’s hand clutched me by the arm and bade me leave it alone.  A case of “Woodman spare that tree,” you see.’

And Arthur laughed lightly at his own morbid fancies, but he left the house and planted around it quantities of woodbine, which soon crept up its sides to the chimney-top and made it look like the ivy-covered cottages so common in Ireland.  It was the nicest kind of rendezvous for lovers, who frequently availed themselves of its seclusion to whisper their secrets to each other, and it was sometimes used as a dining-room by the people of Shannondale, where in summer they held picnics in the pretty pine grove not far away.  But during Arthur’s absence it had been suffered to go to decay, for Frank cared little for lovers or picnics, and less for the tramps who often slept there at night, and for whom it came at last to be called the Tramp House.  So the winds, and the storms, and the boys did their work upon it unmolested, and when Arthur returned, the door hung upon one hinge, and there was scarcely a whole light of glass in the six windows.

’Better tear the old rookery down.  It is of no earthly use except to harbor rats and tramps.  I’ve known two or three to spend the night in it at a time, and once a lot of gipsies quartered themselves here for a week and nearly scared Dolly to death,’ Frank said to his brother as they were walking past it a few days after his return, and Arthur was commenting upon its dilapidated appearance.

‘Oh, the tramps sleep here, do they?’ Arthur said.  ’Well, let them.  If any poor, homeless wretches want to stay here nights they are very welcome, I am sure, and I will see that the door is rehung and glass put in the windows.  May as well make them comfortable.’