He resolutely entered the closet, shut the door, and proceeded to search for the manuscript.  It was soon found, for the directions of old Melmoth were forcibly written, and strongly remembered.  The manuscript, old, tattered, and discolored, was taken from the very drawer in which it was mentioned to be laid.  Melmoth’s hands felt as cold as those of his dead uncle, when he drew the blotted pages from their nook.  He sat down to read,—­there was a dead silence through the house.  Melmoth looked wistfully at the candles, snuffed them, and still thought they looked dim, (perchance he thought they burned blue, but such thought he kept to himself).  Certain it is, he often changed his posture, and would have changed his chair, had there been more than one in the apartment.

He sank for a few moments into a fit of gloomy abstraction, till the sound of the clock striking twelve made him start,—­it was the only sound he had heard for some hours, and the sounds produced by inanimate things, while all living beings around are as dead, have at such an hour an effect indescribably awful.  John looked at his manuscript with some reluctance, opened it, paused over the first lines, and as the wind sighed round the desolate apartment, and the rain pattered with a mournful sound against the dismantled window, wished—­what did he wish for?—­he wished the sound of the wind less dismal, and the dash of the rain less monotonous.—­He may be forgiven, it was past midnight, and there was not a human being awake but himself within ten miles when he began to read.

. . . . .

The manuscript was discolored, obliterated, and mutilated beyond any that had ever before exercised the patience of a reader.  Michaelis himself, scrutinizing into the pretended autograph of St. Mark at Venice, never had a harder time of it.—­Melmoth could make out only a sentence here and there.  The writer, it appeared, was an Englishman of the name of Stanton, who had traveled abroad shortly after the Restoration.  Traveling was not then attended with the facilities which modern improvement has introduced, and scholars and literati, the intelligent, the idle, and the curious, wandered over the Continent for years, like Tom Corvat, though they had the modesty, on their return, to entitle the result of their multiplied observations and labors only “crudities.”

Stanton, about the year 1676, was in Spain; he was, like most of the travelers of that age, a man of literature, intelligence, and curiosity, but ignorant of the language of the country, and fighting his way at times from convent to convent, in quest of what was called “Hospitality,” that is, obtaining board and lodging on the condition of holding a debate in Latin, on some point theological or metaphysical, with any monk who would become the champion of the strife.  Now, as the theology was Catholic, and the metaphysics Aristotelian, Stanton sometimes wished himself at the miserable Posada from