He paused, and my desire to stay was increased a thousandfold by the sense of mystery his laconic words seemed to evoke. There was something queer about this place, and the pervasive musty smell seemed to cloak a thousand secrets. Again I noticed the extreme decrepitude of everything about me; manifest even in the feeble rays of the single small lamp. I felt woefully chilly, and saw with regret that no heating seemed to be provided; yet so great was my curiosity that I still wished most ardently to stay and learn something of the recluse and his dismal abode. "You may stay if you really wish to; you can come to no harm that I know of. Others claim there are certain peculiarly undesirable influences here. As for me, I stay because I have to." With my curiosity still more heightened, I prepared to take my host at his word, and followed him slowly upstairs when he motioned me to do so. It was very dark now, and faint pattering outside told me that the threatened rain had come. I would have been glad of any shelter, but this was doubly welcome because of the hints of mystery about the place and its master. For an incurable lover of the grotesque, no more fitting haven could have been provided. * * * * * There was a second-floor corner room in less unkempt shape than the rest of the house, and into this my host led me, setting down his small lamp and lighting a somewhat larger one. From the cleanliness and contents of the room, and from the books ranged along the walls, I could see that I had not guessed amiss in thinking the man a gentleman of taste and breeding. He was a hermit and eccentric, no doubt, but still had standards and intellectual interests. As he waved me to a seat I began a conversation on general topics, and was pleased to find him not at all taciturn. If anything, he seemed glad of someone to talk to, and did not attempt to swerve the discourse from personal topics. He was, I learned, one Antoine de Russy, of an ancient, powerful and cultivated line of Louisiana planters. More than a century ago his grandfather, a younger son, had migrated to southern Missouri and founded a new estate in the lavish ancestral manner; building this pillared mansion and surrounding it with all the accessories of a great plantation. There had been, at one time, as many as two hundred negroes in the cabins which stood on the flat ground in the rear--ground that the river had now invaded--and to hear them singing and laughing and playing the banjo at night was to know the fullest charm of a civilization and social order now sadly extinct. In front of the house, where the great guardian oaks and willows stood, there had been a lawn like a broad green carpet, always watered and trimmed and with flag-stoned, flower-bordered walks curving through it. Riverside (for such the place was called) had been a lovely and idyllic homestead in its day; and my host could recall it when many traces of its best period still lingered.