At eight years old she fell in love with the high-colored picture of Major Gideon Withers in the crimson sash and the red feather of his exalted military office.  It was then for the first time that her aunt Silence remarked a shade of resemblance between the child and the portrait.  She had always, up to this time, been dressed in sad colors, as was fitting, doubtless, for a forlorn orphan; but happening one day to see a small negro girl peacocking round in a flaming scarlet petticoat, she struck for bright colors in her own apparel, and carried her point at last.  It was as if a ground-sparrow had changed her gray feathers for the burning plumage of some tropical wanderer; and it was natural enough that Cyprian Eveleth should have called her the fire-hang-bird, and her little chamber the fire-hang-bird’s nest,—­using the country boy’s synonyme for the Baltimore oriole.

At ten years old she had one of those great experiences which give new meaning to the life of a child.

Her uncle Malachi had seemed to have a strong liking for her at one time, but of late years his delusions had gained upon him, and under their influence he seemed to regard her as an encumbrance and an extravagance.  He was growing more and more solitary in his habits, more and more negligent of his appearance.  He was up late at night, wandering about the house from the cellar to the garret, so that, his light being seen flitting from window to window, the story got about that the old house was haunted.

One dreary, rainy Friday in November, Myrtle was left alone in the house.  Her uncle had been gone since the day before.  The two women were both away at the village.  At such times the child took a strange delight in exploring all the hiding-places of the old mansion.  She had the mysterious dwelling-place of so many of the dead and the living all to herself.  What a fearful kind of pleasure in its silence and loneliness!  The old clock that Marmaduke Storr made in London more than a hundred years ago was clicking the steady pulse-beats of its second century.  The featured moon on its dial had lifted one eye, as if to watch the child, as it had watched so many generations of children, while the swinging pendulum ticked them along into youth, maturity, gray hairs, deathbeds,—­ticking through the prayer at the funeral, ticking without grief through all the still or noisy woe of mourning,—­ticking without joy when the smiles and gayety of comforted heirs had come back again.  She looked at herself in the tall, bevelled mirror in the best chamber.  She pulled aside the curtains of the stately bedstead whereon the heads of the house had slept until they died and were stretched out upon it, and the sheet shaped itself to them in vague, awful breadth of outline, like a block of monumental marble the sculptor leaves just hinted by the chisel.