me one of us has described in one of his books; but let us look at this one as I can reproduce it from memory.  It has a flooring of laths with ridges of mortar squeezed up between them, which if you tread on you will go to—­the Lord have mercy on you! where will you go to?—­the same being crossed by narrow bridges of boards, on which you may put your feet, but with fear and trembling.  Above you and around you are beams and joists, on some of which you may see, when the light is let in, the marks of the conchoidal clippings of the broadaxe, showing the rude way in which the timber was shaped as it came, full of sap, from the neighboring forest.  It is a realm of darkness and thick dust, and shroud-like cobwebs and dead things they wrap in their gray folds.  For a garret is like a seashore, where wrecks are thrown up and slowly go to pieces.  There is the cradle which the old man you just remember was rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead he died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister’s lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences.  And there are old leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and old brass andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them on their paltry substitutes, and they shall have their own again, and bring with them the fore-stick and the back-log of ancient days; and the empty churn, with its idle dasher, which the Nancys and Phoebes, who have left their comfortable places to the Bridgets and Norahs, used to handle to good purpose; and the brown, shaky old spinning-wheel, which was running, it may be, in the days when they were hinging the Salem witches.

Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which themselves had histories.  On a pane in the northeastern chamber may be read these names: 

“John Tracy,” “Robert Roberts,” “Thomas Prince;” “Stultus” another hand had added.  When I found these names a few years ago (wrong side up, for the window had been reversed), I looked at once in the Triennial to find them, for the epithet showed that they were probably students.  I found them all under the years 1771 and 1773.  Does it please their thin ghosts thus to be dragged to the light of day?  Has “Stultus” forgiven the indignity of being thus characterized?