I went on my way in a condition of astonishment that engendered, almost,
a doubt of my eyes; for if my sight was unimpaired and myself not
subject to optical or mental delusion, neither boy nor dog nor bird nor
cat, nor any other object of this visible world, had entered that opened
door. Was my "finest" house, then, a place of call for wandering ghosts,
who came home to roost at four in the morning?

It was only a step to Mrs. Apperthwaite's; I let myself in with the key
that good lady had given me, stole up to my room, went to my window, and
stared across the yard at the house next door. The front window in the
second story, I decided, necessarily belonged to that room in which the
lamp had been lighted; but all was dark there now. I went to bed, and
dreamed that I was out at sea in a fog, having embarked on a transparent
vessel whose preposterous name, inscribed upon glass life-belts,
depending here and there from an invisible rail, was SIMPLEDORIA.




II


Mrs. Apperthwaite's was a commodious old house, the greater part of it
of about the same age, I judged, as its neighbor; but the late Mr.
Apperthwaite had caught the Mansard fever of the late 'Seventies, and
the building-disease, once fastened upon him, had never known a
convalescence, but, rather, a series of relapses, the tokens of which,
in the nature of a cupola and a couple of frame turrets, were
terrifyingly apparent. These romantic misplacements seemed to me not
inharmonious with the library, a cheerful and pleasantly shabby