silent Bavarian gardener, who was master of the keys; and there
were also certain great cats that were always sunning themselves
on the steps, and seemed to have grown old and gray in waiting
for mice that had never come. They looked as if they knew the
past and the future. If the owl is the bird of Minerva, the cat
should be her beast; they have the same sleepy air of
unfathomable wisdom. There was such a quiet and potent spell
about the place that one could almost fancy these constant
animals to be the transformed bodies of human visitors who had
stayed too long. Who knew what tales might be told by these tall,
slender birches, clustering so closely by the sombre
walls?--birches which were but whispering shrubs when the first
gray stones were laid, and which now reared above the eaves their
white stems and dark boughs, still whispering and waiting till a
few more years should show them, across the roof, the topmost
blossoms of other birches on the other side.

Before the great western doorway spread the outer harbor, whither
the coasting vessels came to drop anchor at any approach of
storm. These silent visitors, which arrived at dusk and went at
dawn, and from which no boat landed, seemed fitting guests before
the portals of the silent house. I was never tired of watching
them from the piazza; but Severance always stayed outside the
wall. It was a whim of his, he said; and once only I got out of
him something about the resemblance of the house to some
Portuguese mansion,--at Madeira, perhaps, or at Rio Janeiro, but
he did not say,--with which he had no pleasant associations. Yet
he afterwards seemed to wish to deny this remark, or to confuse
my impressions of it, which naturally fixed it the better in my
mind.