Chapter 2

Considering that Doctor Grimshawe, when we first look upon him, had
dwelt only a few years in the house by the graveyard, it is wonderful
what an appearance he, and his furniture, and his cobwebs, and their
unweariable spinners, and crusty old Hannah, all had of having
permanently attached themselves to the locality. For a century, at
least, it might be fancied that the study in particular had existed
just as it was now; with those dusky festoons of spider-silk hanging
along the walls, those book-cases with volumes turning their parchment
or black-leather backs upon you, those machines and engines, that
table, and at it the Doctor, in a very faded and shabby dressing-gown,
smoking a long clay pipe, the powerful fumes of which dwelt continually
in his reddish and grisly beard, and made him fragrant wherever he
went. This sense of fixedness--stony intractability--seems to belong to
people who, instead of hope, which exalts everything into an airy,
gaseous exhilaration, have a fixed and dogged purpose, around which
everything congeals and crystallizes. [Endnote: 1] Even the sunshine,
dim through the dustiness of the two casements that looked upon the
graveyard, and the smoke, as it came warm out of Doctor Grimshawe's
mouth, seemed already stale. But if the two children, or either of
them, happened to be in the study,--if they ran to open the door at the
knock, if they came scampering and peeped down over the banisters,--the
sordid and rusty gloom was apt to vanish quite away. The sunbeam itself
looked like a golden rule, that had been flung down long ago, and had
lain there till it was dusty and tarnished. They were cheery little
imps, who sucked up fragrance and pleasantness out of their
surroundings, dreary as these looked; even as a flower can find its
proper perfume in any soil where its seed happens to fall. The great
spider, hanging by his cordage over the Doctor's head, and waving
slowly, like a pendulum, in a blast from the crack of the door, must
have made millions and millions of precisely such vibrations as these;
but the children were new, and made over every day, with yesterday's
weariness left out.

The little girl, however, was the merrier of the two. It was quite
unintelligible, in view of the little care that crusty Hannah took of
her, and, moreover, since she was none of your prim, fastidious
children, how daintily she kept herself amid all this dust; how the
spider's webs never clung to her, and how, when--without being
solicited--she clambered into the Doctor's arms and kissed him, she
bore away no smoky reminiscences of the pipe that he kissed
continually. She had a free, mellow, natural laughter, that seemed the
ripened fruit of the smile that was generally on her little face, to be