As the housemaid prepared to follow her I said, "Am I the only person sleeping on this floor?" She answered, "You are the only one in this wing, miss." "It is a very large house, I suppose?" "Twenty-six bedrooms," answered the housemaid, "but we've shut up most of them. This one has such a good view that Miss Young thought it ought to be used." With that she went away, and I looked round. Six lighted candles and a big wood fire seemed only to accentuate the profound gloom and depression of the large, irregular room. The very first thing I did was to throw a towel over the face of the mirror on the dressing-table. Then I investigated every nook and corner. There was a powdering closet formed in a pepper-box turret. The carpet of the room stopped short at its door, and inside the boards looked loose and uneven. I fetched a candle and soon discovered that the floorboards lifted up quite easily, and beneath them was a black yawning hole, an _oubliette_, through which wretched prisoners were cast in days not so long ago. I replaced the boards, telling myself that in the morning I would have a look at the outside of this black shaft. It probably ended, as most of such places did end in the old Scotch castles, in a big dungeon underground. Inside my big room there were sloping ceilings, and great beams, and an enormous fireplace had been bricked up to suit more modern requirements. There were two doors, the one I had entered by and another which was locked and keyless. The window, with the view, was hidden by heavy red curtains, and the atmosphere was musty and dank, like that of a vault. As I stared around me I could not help thinking what an unfortunate thing it is to be born without any imagination. Any one possessed of a spark of that quality would have hesitated before putting a young guest into so gloomy a chamber, the only room occupied in that wing. "No sleep possible here," I told myself grimly, as I began to dress. Then I set myself to "feel after" what was really wrong with the room. Supposing I did fall asleep, what would happen? Would some one come and try to strangle me in the night? That had actually happened to many people. Would I suddenly awake to the fact that some one unseen was pulling off the bedclothes? That was also a trick common to ghostly visitants.