"The night being so bad, sir," said the watchman, as he gave me back

my glass, "uncommon few have come in at my gate. Besides them three

gentlemen that I have named, I don't call to mind another since about

eleven o'clock, when a stranger asked for you."

"My uncle," I muttered. "Yes."

"You saw him, sir?"

"Yes. Oh yes."

"Likewise the person with him?"

"Person with him!" I repeated.

"I judged the person to be with him," returned the watchman. "The person

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stopped, when he stopped to make inquiry of me, and the person took this

way when he took this way."

"What sort of person?"

The watchman had not particularly noticed; he should say a working

person; to the best of his belief, he had a dust-colored kind of clothes

on, under a dark coat. The watchman made more light of the matter than I

did, and naturally; not having my reason for attaching weight to it.

When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do without

prolonging explanations, my mind was much troubled by these two

circumstances taken together. Whereas they were easy of innocent

solution apart,--as, for instance, some diner out or diner at home,

who had not gone near this watchman's gate, might have strayed to my

staircase and dropped asleep there,--and my nameless visitor might have

brought some one with him to show him the way,--still, joined, they had

an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear as the changes of a

few hours had made me.

I lighted my fire, which burnt with a raw pale flare at that time of the

morning, and fell into a doze before it. I seemed to have been dozing a

whole night when the clocks struck six. As there was full an hour and

a half between me and daylight, I dozed again; now, waking up uneasily,

with prolix conversations about nothing, in my ears; now, making thunder

of the wind in the chimney; at length, falling off into a profound sleep

from which the daylight woke me with a start.

All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation, nor

could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to it. I was greatly

dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale sort of way.

As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon have formed an

elephant. When I opened the shutters and looked out at the wet wild

morning, all of a leaden hue; when I walked from room to room; when I

sat down again shivering, before the fire, waiting for my laundress to

appear; I thought how miserable I was, but hardly knew why, or how long

I had been so, or on what day of the week I made the reflection, or even

who I was that made it.




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