It fell early very cold and wintry that November, but the chill in my heart was colder than any hailstones. Presently such an apathy of despair found me that I would hardly leave my room all day, but would sit in a sullen misery gazing, gazing from my unbarred open window upon the fraction of stiffening world it commanded. It was at a front angle of the house, pretty high above the ground; and under it the stony drive went round an elbow of lofty trees to the fatal unseen gates of the entrance beyond. One morning, after breakfast, I was seated there, when a chaise rolled up to the steps of the door below, and a moment later Dr. Peel entered and was driven rapidly away, on some fresh marauding devilry, I conjectured. The vehicle, sped by a heart-whole curse from my lips, had disappeared scarce a minute, when round the bend of the shrubs it had taken came striding the oddest figure--an interloper by way of the open portals, it seemed. Such an event had never, in my knowledge, happened before. I stared, and roused myself, elate even over this momentary grotesque vision from the world beyond. It was just a stilt-walker, a monstrous pierrot, with floured absurd face and conical cap, his legs, cased in linen trousers, rising an immense height from the ground. As he came on, ridiculously gyrating, he blew a pipe, and rattled at a little tabor that hung from his neck. In the same moment he saw me where I stood, and danced up, rolling and wallowing--for he was an incomprehensibly great creature for such a trade--and broke into a mad, jerky little chaunt, half French, half English, as he approached-- “_O-ha, mamselle! Je vous trouve, je vous salue! A la fin çà, çà, çà!_ “‘Be’old the mountaineer, He sik for edelweiss, I have found my dear Very high and very nice--_çà, çà, çà!_’” He flicked off his cap--with a grin that showed, though against the flour, a set of perfect teeth--and in three strides was at the window, his eyes and huge white face above the level of the sill. Even in the instant, as if the former were a cypher momentarily isolated for my reading, I understood, and was stricken to stone. “The graveyard!” whispered the pierrot in that instant: “be at the wall over against it at ten o’clock to-night”--and reeled away, to a pantomime of grins and pirouettes, as the lodge-keeper came raging round the corner in pursuit. “_O que nenni dà!_” cried the intruder, twisting and turning and affecting to bend with laughter. “O, madame! O, fie! I am very honourable z’jentlemans. Wat, I say! I make you good proposals to marry. I display my parts, _v’là_!” He contorted himself, with absurd coquetry. “Wat!” he protested, pausing; “madame declines of the ravishment? She does not move herself to fly with me? Vair well”-- He pretended of a sudden to espy his pursuer, and pressing his cap to his breast, waltzed up to him.