it would have been at, not through, the skylight. No sky was to be
seen. A thick covering of snow lay over the glass. A partial thaw,
followed by frost, had fixed it there--a mass of imperfect cells and
confused crystals. It was a cold place to sit in, but the boy had
some faculty for enduring cold when it was the price to be paid for
solitude. And besides, when he fell into one of his thinking moods,
he forgot, for a season, cold and everything else but what he was
thinking about--a faculty for which he was to be envied.

If he had gone down the stair, which described half the turn of a
screw in its descent, and had crossed the landing to which it
brought him, he could have entered another bedroom, called the gable
or rather ga'le room, equally at his service for retirement; but,
though carpeted and comfortably furnished, and having two windows at
right angles, commanding two streets, for it was a corner house, the
boy preferred the garret-room--he could not tell why. Possibly,
windows to the streets were not congenial to the meditations in
which, even now, as I have said, the boy indulged.

These meditations, however, though sometimes as abstruse, if not so
continuous, as those of a metaphysician--for boys are not
unfrequently more given to metaphysics than older people are able
or, perhaps, willing to believe--were not by any means confined to
such subjects: castle-building had its full share in the occupation
of those lonely hours; and for this exercise of the constructive
faculty, what he knew, or rather what he did not know, of his own
history gave him scope enough, nor was his brain slow in supplying
him with material corresponding in quantity to the space afforded.
His mother had been dead for so many years that he had only the
vaguest recollections of her tenderness, and none of her person.