Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/717

Rh of King John of England, had described himself as tolerably comfortable in the seventh circle, where he was learning to paint on velvet, under the direction of Mrs. Trimmer and Mary Queen of Scots.

If this should meet the eye of the gentleman who favored me with these disclosures, I trust he will excuse my confessing that the sight of the rising sun, and the contemplation of the magnificent order of the vast universe made me impatient of them. In a word, I was so impatient of them, that I was mightily glad to get out at the next station, and to exchange these clouds and vapors for the free air of heaven. By that time it was a beautiful morning. As I walked away among such leaves as had already fallen from the golden, brown, and russet trees; and as I looked around me on the wonders of creation, and thought of the steady, unchanging and harmonious laws by which they are sustained; the gentleman's spiritual intercourse seemed to me as poor a piece of journey-work as ever this world saw. In which heathen state of mind, I came within view of the house, and stopped to examine it attentively.

It was a solitary house standing in a sadly neglected garden, a pretty even square of some two acres. It was a house of about the time of George the Second; as stiff, as cold, as formal, and in as bad taste, as could possibly be desired by the most loyal admirer of the whole quartette of Georges. It was uninhabited, but had, within a year or two, been cheaply repaired to render it habitable; I say cheaply because the work had been done in a surface manner, and was already decaying as to the paint and plaster, though the colors were fresh. A lopsided board drooped over the garden wall, announcing that it was "To let on very reasonable terms, well furnished." It was much too closely and heavily shadowed by trees, and in particular, there were six tall poplars before the front windows, which were excessively melancholy, and the site of which had been extremely ill chosen.

It was easy to see that it was an avoided house—a house that was shunned by the village, to which my eye was guided by a church spire some half a mile off—a house that nobody would take. And the natural inference was, that it had the reputation of being a haunted house.

No period within the four-and-twenty hours of day and