Description

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Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely tobe wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to befallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; "but that's no rule," as the ghost of Giles Scroggins saysin the ballad.The dread word, GHOST, recalls me.Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of my present claim for everybody is, thatthey were so far right. He did.Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinablygrim, although well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-weed, about his face, -as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beatingof the great deep of humanity, -but might have said he looked like a haunted man?Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and time, or oflistening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man?Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave, with a natural fulness and melodyin it which he seemed to set himself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of ahaunted man?Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part laboratory, -for he was, as theworld knew, far and wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands acrowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily, -who that had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp amonstrous beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there by theflickering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection ofglass vessels that held liquids), trembling at heart like things that knew his power to uncombinethem, and to give back their component parts to fire and vapour;-who that had seen him then, hiswork done, and he pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thinmouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not have said that the man seemed haunted andthe chamber too?Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed that everything about him took thishaunted tone, and that he lived on haunted ground?3His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like, -an old, retired part of an ancient endowment forstudents, once a brave edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgottenarchitects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side by the overgrowing of the greatcity, and choked, like an old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in verypits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time, had been constructed above itsheavy chimney stalks; its old trees, insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop solow when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-plots, struggling with themildewed earth to be grass, or to win any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomedto the tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a stray face looked down fromthe upper world, wondering what nook it was; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where no sunhad straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the sun's neglect, the snow wouldlie 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.