“Stop a bit, Henry,” she exclaims, “until I have looked into the cupboards and places;” which she proceeds to do most minutely, investigating even the short drawers of a foot and a half square.  I am at length dismissed upon my perilous errand, and Mrs. B. locks and double-locks the door behind me with a celerity that almost catches my retreating garment.  My expedition therefore combines all the dangers of a sally, with the additional disadvantage of having my retreat into my own fortress cut off.  Thus cumbrously but ineffectually caparisoned, I peramulate the lower stories of the house in darkness, in search of the disturber of Mrs. B.’s repose, which, I am well convinced, is behind the wainscot of her own apartment, and nowhere else.  The pantry, I need not say, is as silent as the grave, and about as cold.  The great clock in the kitchen looks spectral enough by the light of the expiring embers, but there is nothing there with life except black-beetles, which crawl in countless numbers over my naked ankles.  There is a noise in the cellar such as Mrs. B. would at once identify with the suppressed converse of anticipated burglars, but which I recognise in a moment as the dripping of the small-beer cask, whose tap is troubled with a nervous disorganisation of that kind.  The dining-room is chill and cheerless; a ghostly armchair is doing the grim honours of the table to three other vacant seats, and dispensing hospitality in the shape of a mouldy orange and some biscuits, which I remember to have left in some disgust, about——­Hark! the clicking of a revolver?  No! the warning of the great clock—­one, two, three....  What a frightful noise it makes in the startled ear of night!  Twelve o’clock.  I left this dining-room, then, but three hours and a-half ago; it certainly does not look like the same room now.  The drawing-room is also far from wearing its usual snug and comfortable appearance.  Could we possibly have all been sitting in the relative positions to one another which these chairs assume?  Or since we were there, has some spiritual company, with no eye for order left among them, taken advantage of the remains of our fire to hold a reunion?  They are here even at this moment perhaps, and their gentlemen have not yet come up from the dining-room.  I shudder from head to foot, partly at the bare idea of such a thing, partly from the naked fact of my exceedingly unclothed condition.  They do say that in the very passage which I have now to cross in order to get to Mrs. B. again, my great-grandfather “walks”; in compensation, I suppose, for having been prevented by gout from taking that species of exercise while he was alive.  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, I think, as I approach this spot; but I do not say so, for I am well-nigh speechless with the cold:  yes, the cold.  It is only my teeth that chatter.  What a scream that was!  There it comes again, and there is no doubt this time as to who is the owner of that terrified voice.  Mrs. B.’s alarms have evidently taken some other direction.  “Henry, Henry!” she cries, in tones of a very tolerable pitch.  A lady being in the case, I fly upon the wings of domestic love along the precincts sacred to the perambulations of my great-grandfather.  I arrive at my wife’s chamber; the screams continue, but the door is locked.