of my father's room, where even I, his son, had never been at night, and
indeed but seldom in the day. For it was the Hereditary Justicer's fancy
to lodge himself in the high garret which ran right across the top of the
Red Tower, and was entered only by a little ladder from the first turning
of the same staircase by which I had run out upon the leads.

I went to the bottom of the garret turnpike. The little barred door stood
open, and I heard--I was sure that I heard--light, irregularly pattering
footsteps moving about above.

It gave me strange shakings of my heart only to listen. For, though I was
noways afraid of my father myself, yet since I had never seen any man,
woman, or child (save the Duke only) who did not quail at his approach,
it was a curious feeling to think of the lonely little child skipping
about up there, where abode the axe and the block--the axe which had
done, I knew so well what, to her father only the night before.

So I mustered all my courage--not from any fear of Gottfried Gottfried,
but rather from the uncertainty of what I should see, and quickly mounted
the stair.

I shall never forget what I saw as I stood with my feet on the rickety
hand-rail of the ladder. The long dim garret was already half-lighted by
the coming day. Red cloaks swung and flapped like vast, deadly, winged
bats from the rafters, and reached almost to the ground. There was no
glass in any of the windows of the garret, for my father minded neither
heat nor cold. He was a man of iron. Summer's heat nor winter's cold
neither vexed nor pleasured him. So it was no marvel that at the
chamber's upper end, and quite near to my father's bed, lay a wreath of
snow, with a fine, clean-cut, untrampled edge, just as it had blown in at