"Please remember that this is a mountain which contains many caves besides that to which we are about to commit you. And if you interfere with anybody else's cave, the inhabitant will spring up yours with gunpowder." "I know that a great many people live in one house,--my mother said so; but she never told me how you got into the houses." "I will tell you now. You see the bells here, like organ-stops: this is yours. Number I cannot read, but I know it from the description I took care to procure. I will ring now, and they will let us in." I found, after waiting in profound expectation, that the door had set itself open, just as the gate of the London Temple Garden is wont to do; but instead of finding access to sunshine and beds of flowers, we were plunged, on our entrance, into darkness which might be felt. Santonio, evidently accustomed to all conventionalities of all countries, expressed no astonishment, and did not even grumble, as I should have expected a person of his temperament to do. I was so astonished that I could not speak. How soon I learned to love that very darkness, and to leap up and down those very stairs even in the darkness! though I now held Santonio's hand so tightly that I could feel the lissom muscles double up and bend in. He drew me after him gently and carefully to the first floor, and again to the second without speaking, and then we stood still to take breath. "That was a pull!" he observed. "Suppose the old gentleman has gone to bed?" "Oh, sir! then I will go back with you until to-morrow." "No, indeed." He laid hold upon my arm. "Listen! hush!" I stood listening from head to foot. I heard the beloved but unfamiliar voice; creeping down another story, it came--_my_ violin, or _the_ violin, somewhere up in the clouds. I longed to rush forward now, and positively ran up the stairs yet remaining. There upon my one hand was the door through whose keyhole, whose every crack, that sound had streamed, and I knew it as I passed, and waited for Santonio upon the haunted precinct. "Now," said he, arriving very leisurely at the top, "we shall go in to see the old gentleman." "Will he have a beard, sir, as he is a Jew?" "Who told you he has a Jew-beard? Nevertheless he has a beard; but pray hold your tongue about the Jews,--at least till you know him a little better."