Here I see that I must attempt a somewhat more detailed account of the Doctor’s house than I have hitherto given. It is a square detached building, situated in the outskirts of the place, facing the road, and having no garden-railing or other space of any sort in front of it. What it appears, however, to want in privacy here, is made up for by the retirement to be obtained at the back of the house, which, it will be remembered, had been cut off from the front by the heavy door which the Doctor had erected in the middle of the lobby, and which he kept constantly locked, himself carrying the key always about him. The front of the house is continued, so to speak, by two high walls, that, together with the house itself, form the front of a long parallelogram, of which the sides and back are also high walls of masonry. The area within consists of a small paved court, and of a large garden, of which neither old Mole nor his successor took any care, and which is, and was, a perfect wilderness of rank luxuriant weeds, of moss-covered apple-trees, and of gooseberry and currant bushes on which the fruit never ripens. The walls are covered with ivy instead of fruit-trees, diversified here and there by a piece of new masonry, where the Doctor had them raised higher; and the whole place is dark, gloomy, cold, and tree-shaded. The rumours about the Doctor, which at first were vague, and confined to the lower and more credulous order of persons, after a time began to be talked of among all classes; and it is wonderful, after they once began to be openly spoken of, how rapidly they spread, and how generally they were believed. It was said, then, that strange sounds were occasionally to be heard proceeding from the New Doctor’s house. A hoarse strange voice was sometimes heard speaking rapidly and threateningly for a time, and then was suddenly hushed; and it was said that occasionally a shrill wild shriek of agony or terror might be heard issuing from the recesses of the building. And those two young villains, Higgs’s boys, who will never come to any good, I fear, when they stole a ladder one night, and got over the back wall of the Doctor’s garden—to find their ball, they said, but, I believe, to steal the few apples that were on the trees—were so frightened by the strange ghostly lights that were flitting about in the windows of the house, that they ran off in the utmost terror and affright, leaving the ladder, and Bob’s, the youngest boy’s, cap behind them. I and some others did not pay much attention to these stories, although it was impossible to help believing some part of them—and, indeed, I had myself, on more than one occasion, heard from Miss Cringle’s room strange sounds proceeding from the Doctor’s house;—but amongst children and the ignorant they made an immense impression; so that, after a time, the little boys and girls would run away, screaming with terror, when the New Doctor approached; and even