But what really was singular in the appearance of the apartment, and what Crawford noted at once, although he did not allude to it until afterwards, was--first, a ghastly attempt at painting, hanging behind the chimney, representing a death's-head and cross-bones, which might have been executed by an artist in whitewash, on a ground of black muslin. Second, a hanging shelf in one corner, with a dozen or two of dingy small bottles and vials, and a rod lying across it, apparently made from a black birchen switch, peeled in sections. Third, and most important of all, a string of twine suspended from one side of the room to the other, in front of the fire-place and near the ceiling, and hung with objects that required a moment to recognize. Among them, when closely examined, could be found two or three bats, dried; a string of snake's eggs, blackened by being smoked; a tail and two legs of a black cat; a bunch of the dried leaves of the black hellebore; a snake's skin--not the "shedder" or superficial skin, but the cuticle itself, peeled from the writhing reptile; two objects that might have been spotted toads, run over by wagons until thoroughly flattened--then dried; and one object which could not well be anything more or less than the hand of a child a few weeks old, cut off just above the wrist and subjected to some kind of embalming or drying process. The purposes of this narrative do not require the recording of all the conversation which took place between the Tombs lawyer and Aunt Synchy, when the latter had dusted off one of the miserable chairs and forced the former down into it, taking another herself, sitting square in front of him, and thrusting her face so close into his that the withered features seemed almost plastered against his own. It is enough to say that that conversation corroborated the suspicion which the first words of the crone would have engendered--that Aunt Synchy, in her younger days, had been a slave in the Crawford family, in a neighboring State where the institution had not yet been entirely abolished--and that, at last manumitted by a mistaken kindness, she had finally wandered away to the crime and misery of negro life in the great city. She retained, as people of that feudal class always do, a vivid recollection of her early life and of all the residents of the section where she had lived; and Egbert Crawford, who was in the habit of putting many questions to others, was not in the habit of answering quite so many as the old woman put to him concerning the intermediate histories of the families of which she had now lost sight for more than a quarter of a century.