"My curiosity was at the greatest possible stretch of excitement; and without waiting for the old woman's permission, I ran into the cottage. The twilight was beginning to fall; and, by the sinking light, I found a neat, well-arranged little room, a few cups and glasses on a sideboard, and some singular-looking boxes on a table. In a very beautiful cage in the window hung a bird; and it was indeed from it that the song came which I had heard. The old woman was coughing and panting, hardly able to recover her breath. She took scarcely any notice of me--did not even seem to know I was present--but patted her little dog, and then turned and talked to the bird, which only answered with singing the same song. All this time I stood watching her movements; and it almost frightened me to see how eternally her face kept working and twitching; her head, too, shook as if age had loosened its hold on her shoulders; and altogether she looked so odd and strange, that, do what I would, I could not make out what her features were like. "When she had got her breath again, she lit a candle, threw a cloth over a little table, and put out some supper. At last she turned round to me, and told me to take one of the twisted-cane chairs, and sit down. I did so, and seated myself exactly opposite to her, with the light between us. Then she folded her lanky withered fingers together, and said a long prayer, making all the time such strange contortions with her face, that again it was all I could do to help bursting out laughing. But I was afraid of making her angry, and checked myself. After supper, she said another long grace, and then shewed me a bed in a little narrow chamber adjoining, she herself sleeping in the room in which we supped. I was tired and half stupified, and so soon fell asleep. I awoke several times, however, in the night, and heard the old woman coughing and talking to her dog, and the bird now and then--which seemed to be in a dream--bringing out single words and lines of its song. The chestnuts rustled outside the window; far away a nightingale was singing; and all these sounds together made so odd a mixture, that I could hardly persuade myself I was awake, and that I had not fallen into another still stranger dream.