With my heart in my mouth, I stooped and peered in.  I could see nothing—­a black hole and nothing more.  This caused me a moment’s hesitation.  I was afraid of the dark—­had always been.  But curiosity and the spirit of adventure triumphed.  Saying to myself that I was Robinson Crusoe exploring the cave, I crawled in, only to find that I had gained nothing.  It was as dark inside as it had looked to be from without.

“There was no fun in this, so I crawled back, and when I tried the experiment again, it was with a bit of candle in my hand, and a surreptitious match or two.  What I saw, when with a very trembling little hand I had lighted one of the matches, would have been disappointing to most boys, but not to me.  The litter and old boards I saw in odd corners about me were full of possibilities, while in the dimness beyond I seemed to perceive a sort of staircase which might lead—­I do not think I made any attempt to answer that question even in my own mind, but when, after some hesitation and a sense of great daring, I finally crept up those steps, I remember very well my sensation at finding myself in front of a narrow closed door.  It suggested too vividly the one in Grandfather’s little room—­the door in the wainscot which we were never to open.  I had my first real trembling fit here, and at once fascinated and repelled by this obstruction I stumbled and lost my candle, which, going out in the fall, left me in total darkness and a very frightened state of mind.  For my imagination which had been greatly stirred by my own vague thoughts of the forbidden room, immediately began to people the space about me with ghoulish figures.  How should I escape them, how ever reach my own little room again undetected and in safety?

But these terrors, deep as they were, were nothing to the real fright which seized me when, the darkness finally braved, and the way found back into the bright, wide-open halls of the house, I became conscious of having dropped something besides the candle.  My match-box was gone—­not my match-box, but my grandfather’s which I had found lying on his table and carried off on this adventure, in all the confidence of irresponsible youth.  To make use of it for a little while, trusting to his not missing it in the confusion I had noticed about the house that morning, was one thing; to lose it was another.  It was no common box.  Made of gold and cherished for some special reason well known to himself, I had often hear him say that some day I would appreciate its value, and be glad to own it.  And I had left it in that hole and at any minute he might miss it—­possibly ask for it!  The day was one of torment.  My mother was away or shut up in her room.  My father—­I don’t know just what thoughts I had about him.  He was not to be seen either, and the servants cast strange looks at me when I spoke his name.  But I little realized the blow which had just fallen upon the house in his definite departure, and only thought of my own trouble, and of how I should meet my grandfather’s eye when the hour came for him to draw me to his knee for his usual good-night.