It was just before the expected return of Gusty, near the close of the winter, when Hagar was driven in from her rambles by the arising of a furious storm. She betook herself to the garret, her place of refuge in times of trouble. Poor little Rose, repulsed by the gloom and ill-temper of “uncle,” had already hidden herself there; and the children sat before the fireless hearth—the desolate children in the desolate scene. It was a large, low, square room, with two deep dormer windows facing the east, and looking far out upon the bay—with a dark cuddie under the eaves of the western wall—with a rude fire-place on the south, and opposite on the north, the door leading from the room into the narrow passage and down the stairs. The walls were very dark, and the plastering broken here and there. Between the two dormer windows, and close to the floor, was a large crevice in the wall, through which you might look into the long dark space between the wall and the edge of the roof, a space corresponding to the cuddie on the opposite side. Strange sounds were sometimes heard in this place, and through the crevice. Hagar, that child of shadows, would look with mysterious awe—for with its boundaries lost in obscurity, to her it seemed a dark profound sinking through the house down to the centre of the earth, while her imagination loved to people it with ghosts, gnomes, and all the subterranean demons she had read of in her favorite book, the Arabian Nights. “Listen! listen to the spirits,” she would sometimes whisper in wantonness to her little cousin. “I hear nothing but the rats in the cuddie,” would the matter of fact Rose reply. The floor of the attic was bare, the planks rude and rough, and worn apart in some places, leaving dark apertures, down which Hagar would look as into an interminable abyss, the haunt of her favorite gnomes. There was no furniture in this room except an old trunk without a top, that sometimes served Rosalia for a baby-house, and sometimes reversed, for a seat. Upon this trunk the children were now seated. The storm still raged around the old house-top—the shingles were reft off, whirled aloft, and sent clattering like hail-stones to the ground; the wind howled and shrieked about the walls, and the old windows and rafters writhed and groaned in the blast, like the wail of lost souls, and the laugh of exultant fiends. The rain was dashed in floods against the crazy windows, and the children sprinkled through their crevices. The water began to stream from the leakages in the ceiling, and to collect in puddles in the corners of the room. These puddles enlarging and approaching each other, threatened to overflow the floor. The children drew their trunk upon the fireless hearth. Rose’s little chubby arms and legs were red with cold. “Oh! how the wind’s a-blowing. I am almost frozen,” wept Rose. And they were. “Let’s go into the parlor,” suggested Rose.