led to the house. He arrived: black slaves, silent as the grave, received him; and a white but hideous dwarf led him through the huge and lonely apartments, lighted by four mute flambeau-bearers. The signs of wealth scattered around so profusely, forced from him exclamations of surprise and admiration; but no reply was elicited, and no sound of human voice was heard in any of the sumptuous rooms through which he was conducted. Sign of food or firing there was none. At length they reached a chamber hung with tapestry: its half-faded colours made more ghastly the scene it represented—souls suffering in purgatory. The sheets of blue flame, the spectral figures which writhed in every attitude of pain, the wan and distorted faces, took a strange reality of horror from the high wind that shook the arras, and the flickering light flung over it by the waving torches.
In the midst of these pleasant objects of contemplation, at a little table, on which lay a large folio printed in unknown character, sat the master of the house—he who, it was said, shunned society, to dwell in unbroken and splendid solitude; whose light shone at midnight from the vast and lonely tower, but of whose pursuits all were ignorant. He was rather past the middle age, intellectual in face, and stately in figure; but the face was pale and care-worn, and the figure bent, as if from physical weakness. The loose black gown in which he was wrapped, gave him the appearance of an invalid, or
