frank and cheerful nature; very exact in his observance of truth, and
not by any means like myself--of an excitable or nervous temperament.

My Uncle Ludlow--Tom's father--while we were attending lectures,
purchased three or four old houses in Aungier Street, one of which was
unoccupied. _He_ resided in the country, and Tom proposed that we should
take up our abode in the untenanted house, so long as it should continue
unlet; a move which would accomplish the double end of settling us
nearer alike to our lecture-rooms and to our amusements, and of
relieving us from the weekly charge of rent for our lodgings.

Our furniture was very scant--our whole equipage remarkably modest and
primitive; and, in short, our arrangements pretty nearly as simple as
those of a bivouac. Our new plan was, therefore, executed almost as soon
as conceived. The front drawing-room was our sitting-room. I had the
bedroom over it, and Tom the back bedroom on the same floor, which
nothing could have induced me to occupy.

The house, to begin with, was a very old one. It had been, I believe,
newly fronted about fifty years before; but with this exception, it had
nothing modern about it. The agent who bought it and looked into the
titles for my uncle, told me that it was sold, along with much other
forfeited property, at Chichester House, I think, in 1702; and had
belonged to Sir Thomas Hacket, who was Lord Mayor of Dublin in James
II.'s time. How old it was _then_, I can't say; but, at all events, it
had seen years and changes enough to have contracted all that mysterious
and saddened air, at once exciting and depressing, which belongs to most
old mansions.

There had been very little done in the way of modernising details; and,