There were other circumstances that kept up the impression produced by these two singular facts I have just mentioned.  There was a dark storeroom, on looking through the key-hole of which, I could dimly see a heap of chairs and tables, and other four-footed things, which seemed to me to have rushed in there, frightened, and in their fright to have huddled together and climbed up on each other’s backs,—­as the people did in that awful crush where so many were killed, at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty.  Then the Lady’s portrait, up-stairs, with the sword-thrusts through it,—­marks of the British officers’ rapiers,—­and the tall mirror in which they used to look at their red coats,—­confound them for smashing its mate?—­and the deep, cunningly wrought arm-chair in which Lord Percy used to sit while his hair was dressing;—­he was a gentleman, and always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save the silk covering my grandmother embroidered.  Then the little room downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on the hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,—­“the study” in my father’s time, but in those days the council-chamber of armed men,—­sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will show you the “dents” left by the butts of their muskets all over the floor.  With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the wild stories those awful country-boys that came to live in our service brought with them;—­of contracts written in blood and left out over night, not to be found the next morning, (removed by the Evil One, who takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed away for future use,)—­of dreams coming true,—­of death-signs,—­of apparitions, no wonder that my imagination got excited, and I was liable to superstitious fancies.

Jeremy Bentham’s logic, by which he proved that he couldn’t possibly see a ghost is all very well-in the day-time.  All the reason in the world will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just such circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man’s head.  That is the only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of curiosity with which I watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy with which I lie awake whenever I hear anything going on in his chamber after midnight.

But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred for the present.  You will see in what way it happened that my thoughts were turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how I got my fancy full of material images,—­faces, heads, figures, muscles, and so forth,—­in such a way that I should have no chance in this number to gratify any curiosity you may feel, if I had the means of so doing.

Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this time.  It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it that I should sit to him for my portrait.  When a soul draws a body in the great lottery of life, where every one is sure of a prize, such as it is, the said soul inspects the said body with the same curious interest with which one who has ventured into a “gift enterprise” examines the “massive silver pencil-case” with the coppery smell and impressible tube, or the “splendid gold ring” with the questionable specific gravity, which it has been his fortune to obtain in addition to his purchase.