Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed that
everything about him took this haunted tone, and that he lived on
haunted ground?

His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like,--an old, retired part
of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted
in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten
architects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side
by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well,
with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very
pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time,
had been constructed above its heavy chimney stalks; its old trees,
insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop so low
when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-
plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to win
any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to the
tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a
stray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook it
was; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where no sun had
straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the
sun's neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere
else, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top,
when in all other places it was silent and still.

His dwelling, at its heart and core--within doors--at his fireside-
-was so lowering and old, so crazy, yet so strong, with its worn-
eaten beams of wood in the ceiling, and its sturdy floor shelving
downward to the great oak chimney-piece; so environed and hemmed in
by the pressure of the town yet so remote in fashion, age, and
custom; so quiet, yet so thundering with echoes when a distant