Well, the winter holidays came at last, and I was left sole inhabitant of that vast and lonely school-room, with one fire for my solace, and one tenpenny dip for my enlightenment. How awful and supernatural seemed every passing sound that beat upon my anxious ears! Everything round me seemed magnified--the massive shadows were as the wombs teeming with unearthly phantoms--the whistle of the wintry blasts against the windows, voiced the half-unseen beings that my fears acknowledged in the deep darknesses of the vast chamber. And then that lonely orchestra,-- often did I think that I heard low music from the organ, as if touched by ghostly fingers--how gladly I would have sunk down from my solitude to the vulgarity of the servant's hall--but that was now carefully interdicted. The consequences of all this seclusion to a highly imaginative and totally unregulated mind, must have been much worse than putting me to sleep in the haunted room, for in that I had my counter-spell--and long use had almost endeared me to it and its grotesque carvings--but this dismally large school-room, generally so instinct with life, so superabounding in animation, was painfully fearful, even from the contrast. Twenty times in the evening, when the cold blast came creeping along the floor and wound round my ankles, did I imagine it was the chill hand of some corpse, thrust up from beneath, that was seizing me in order to drag me downwards--and a hundred times, as the long flame from the candle flared up tremulously, and shook the deep shadows that encompassed me around, did I fancy that there were very hideous faces indeed mouthing at me amidst the gloom--and my own gigantic shadow--it was a vast horror of itself personified! It was a cruel thing, even in Mr Root, to leave me alone so many hours in that stupendous gloom; but his wife--fie upon her! Considering how my imagination had been before worked upon, even from my earliest childhood, and the great nervous excitability of my temperament, it is a wonder that my mind did not reel, if not succumb-- but I now began to combat the approaches of one sort of insanity with the actual presence of another--I _wrote verses_. That was "tempering the wind to the shorn lamb," as Sterne would have expressed it, after the prettiest fashion imaginable.