Chapter 2

MASTER HUMPHREY, FROM HIS CLOCK-SIDE IN THE CHIMNEY-CORNER

MY old companion tells me it is midnight. The fire glows brightly,
crackling with a sharp and cheerful sound, as if it loved to burn.
The merry cricket on the hearth (my constant visitor), this ruddy
blaze, my clock, and I, seem to share the world among us, and to be
the only things awake. The wind, high and boisterous but now, has
died away and hoarsely mutters in its sleep. I love all times and
seasons each in its turn, and am apt, perhaps, to think the present
one the best; but past or coming I always love this peaceful time
of night, when long-buried thoughts, favoured by the gloom and
silence, steal from their graves, and haunt the scenes of faded
happiness and hope.

The popular faith in ghosts has a remarkable affinity with the
whole current of our thoughts at such an hour as this, and seems to
be their necessary and natural consequence. For who can wonder
that man should feel a vague belief in tales of disembodied spirits
wandering through those places which they once dearly affected,
when he himself, scarcely less separated from his old world than
they, is for ever lingering upon past emotions and bygone times,
and hovering, the ghost of his former self, about the places and
people that warmed his heart of old? It is thus that at this quiet
hour I haunt the house where I was born, the rooms I used to tread,
the scenes of my infancy, my boyhood, and my youth; it is thus that
I prowl around my buried treasure (though not of gold or silver),
and mourn my loss; it is thus that I revisit the ashes of
extinguished fires, and take my silent stand at old bedsides. If
my spirit should ever glide back to this chamber when my body is
mingled with the dust, it will but follow the course it often took
in the old man's lifetime, and add but one more change to the
subjects of its contemplation.

In all my idle speculations I am greatly assisted by various
legends connected with my venerable house, which are current in the
neighbourhood, and are so numerous that there is scarce a cupboard
or corner that has not some dismal story of its own. When I first
entertained thoughts of becoming its tenant, I was assured that it
was haunted from roof to cellar, and I believe that the bad opinion
in which my neighbours once held me, had its rise in my not being
torn to pieces, or at least distracted with terror, on the night I
took possession; in either of which cases I should doubtless have
arrived by a short cut at the very summit of popularity.

But traditions and rumours all taken into account, who so abets me
in every fancy and chimes with my every thought, as my dear deaf
friend? and how often have I cause to bless the day that brought