The room was a small square chamber, lined with squalid panelling, and floored, like the rest of the building, with stone. The rain of the preceding night had come through the roof at one corner, staining the ceiling and the walls. There was but one window, covered not only with a large moveable shutter, formed of planks of wood, but with a blanket, pinned up with two forks, so as to prevent the slightest ray of light from finding its way out through the crevices. The air felt hot and close, although there was neither fire nor fire-place, and the night was cold. In one corner was a bed, of the most humble description, without curtains, and by its side stood a chair and a table, the latter supporting several phials partly filled with medicine, and a tea-cup, as well as a solitary tallow candle, with a long, unsnuffed wick, set in a large, dirty, tin candlestick. The bedding seemed to consist of a mattress or palliass, part of which was apparent, two or three coarse rugs and a sheet, with an ill-filled bolster, doubled up to support the head. As soon as Edgar entered the room, the form of a man raised itself slowly and painfully up in the bed, supporting itself on the right arm, and a pair of hollow eyes gazed at him earnestly. The head was surrounded with a bandage, and the wild gray hair floated loose about it; while beneath appeared a countenance full of intelligence, but worn and haggard, apparently with sickness and suffering. The hue of robust health was totally gone; and the pale, yellow, waxy tint of the skin seemed more sallow from a black plaster down one check, and a gray and reddish beard of eight or nine days' growth. No one, probably, who had known Norries in health, would have recognised him at that moment; and Edgar Adelon who had never seen him, except once as a boy, imagined at first that there must be some mistake. Association, as it is called, is perhaps one of the most extraordinary phenomena of the human mind: not alone in the rapid power which it has of awakening recollection from the slumber of long years to the things of the past, but in the strange difference of the means by which it is itself excited. With one man it is a sight; with another, a sound; with another, an odour; with another, a taste, which calls up suddenly scenes and circumstances and persons, which have been long buried beneath the sand and rubbish of passing things in the course of years. With Edgar Adelon the exciting cause, in almost all instances, was sound; and the moment Mr. Norries spoke, he recollected his voice, and the place where he had last beheld him; and all that then took place flashed back upon his memory like a scene in a dream. "Are you Mr. Adelon?" demanded the wounded man. "The same," answered Edgar. "What! not the boy who came to call upon Mr. Sherborne, with Sir Arthur Adelon, some six or seven years ago?" rejoined Norries. "How you are changed!"