build under the eaves and twitter upon the window sills and house-top, forsook the ill-fated building and left it to its destiny. I do not know what it was, but there was something which powerfully attracted my attention to the place, and I often sat at my window and mused upon it. Sometimes I thought it was in Chancery, for it had just the look of a house which the lawyers had thoroughly riddled; and sometimes I thought it had the reputation of being haunted, for somehow or other people always give ghosts credit for the very worst taste, and seem to think them incapable of choosing any but the most uncomfortable habitations. Passers-by would often stop to look at the house, and not unfrequently some of them would look over it; and then the owner or his agent would come with them, bringing the rusty key which turned with difficulty in the lock, and setting free the creaking door, which moved so lazily upon its hinges. This person was such a human likeness to the house, that I sometimes wondered he did not, out of pure sympathy, come and live there himself. He was a little battered-looking old man, whose rusty dirty suit of black just matched the doors and shutters, and I could almost fancy that his very spectacles, like the windows, were cracked and broken by boys throwing stones at him. These inquiries, however, always resulted in nothing, except the great discomfiture of the children, who held dominion over the door-step, and who were always summarily routed and driven off by peevish exclamations and feeble cuffs from the rusty little old man. I suppose most of those who came were merely actuated by curiosity. I was more than once tempted by the same motive to go and look at the inside myself, and those who really had serious designs of settling there were frightened out of them by the combined dismalness of the place, and the warder who had charge of it. At last, there really was some sign of the empty house being let. I noticed one evening that a respectable, quiet-looking young couple, with an old lady in widow's weeds, whom I immediately decided was the widowed mother of either husband or wife (for of course they were husband and wife) went to look at the empty house, attended by the little old man; and from the fact, that after looking at the premises for a longer time than visitors usually did, the party came out, and, contrary to custom, all four walked away together, I was led to suppose that I might have opposite neighbors.