being very badly haunted indeed, and which had recently been twice
abandoned on that account, I lived eight months, most tranquilly
and pleasantly: notwithstanding that the house had a score of
mysterious bedrooms, which were never used, and possessed, in one
large room in which I sat reading, times out of number at all
hours, and next to which I slept, a haunted chamber of the first
pretensions. I gently hinted these considerations to the landlord.
And as to this particular house having a bad name, I reasoned with
him, Why, how many things had bad names undeservedly, and how easy
it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I
were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking
old drunken tinker of the neighborhood had sold himself to the
Devil, he would come in time to be suspected of that commercial
venture! All this wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the
landlord, I am bound to confess, and was as dead a failure as ever
I made in my life.

To cut this part of the story short, I was piqued about the haunted
house, and was already half resolved to take it. So, after
breakfast, I got the keys from Perkins's brother-in-law (a whip and
harness maker, who keeps the Post Office, and is under submission
to a most rigorous wife of the Doubly Seceding Little Emmanuel
persuasion), and went up to the house, attended by my landlord and
by Ikey.

Within, I found it, as I had expected, transcendently dismal. The
slowly changing shadows waved on it from the heavy trees, were
doleful in the last degree; the house was ill-placed, ill-built,
ill-planned, and ill-fitted. It was damp, it was not free from dry
rot, there was a flavor of rats in it, and it was the gloomy victim