The patients, or whatever other visitors were ever admitted into the
Doctor's study, carried abroad strange accounts of the squalor of dust
and cobwebs in which the learned and scientific person lived; and the
dust, they averred, was all the more disagreeable, because it could not
well be other than dead men's almost intangible atoms, resurrected from
the adjoining graveyard. As for the cobwebs, they were no signs of
housewifely neglect on the part of crusty Hannah, the handmaiden; but
the Doctor's scientific material, carefully encouraged and preserved,
each filmy thread more valuable to him than so much golden wire. Of all
barbarous haunts in Christendom or elsewhere, this study was the one
most overrun with spiders. They dangled from the ceiling, crept upon
the tables, lurked in the corners, and wove the intricacy of their webs
wherever they could hitch the end from point to point across the
window-panes, and even across the upper part of the doorway, and in the
chimney-place. It seemed impossible to move without breaking some of
these mystic threads. Spiders crept familiarly towards you and walked
leisurely across your hands: these were their precincts, and you only
an intruder. If you had none about your person, yet you had an odious
sense of one crawling up your spine, or spinning cobwebs in your
brain,--so pervaded was the atmosphere of the place with spider-life.
What they fed upon (for all the flies for miles about would not have
sufficed them) was a secret known only to the Doctor. Whence they came
was another riddle; though, from certain inquiries and transactions of
Doctor Grimshawe's with some of the shipmasters of the port, who
followed the East and West Indian, the African and the South American
trade, it was supposed that this odd philosopher was in the habit of
importing choice monstrosities in the spider kind from all those tropic
regions. [Endnote: 6.]