The way that we did choose led into a small round cellar, lighted by a narrow, dusty window, now closed. Formless things stood everywhere--crates, tubs, shelves whose ghostly contents were shrouded by newspapers. It occurred to me that I had never yet told Mary Elizabeth about our cellar. I decided to do so then and there. She backed up against the wall to listen, manifestly so that there should be nothing over her shoulder. Our cellar was a round, bricked-in place under the dining-room. Sometimes I had been down there while they had been selecting preserves by candle-light. And I had long ago settled that the curved walls were set with little sealed doors behind each of which _He_ sat. These _He’s_ were not in the least unfriendly--they merely sat there close to the wall, square shouldered and very still, looking neither to right nor left, waiting. Probably, I thought, it might happen some day--whatever they waited for; and then they would all go away. Meanwhile, there they were; and they evidently knew that I knew they were there, but they evidently did not expect me to mention it; for once, when I did so, they all stopped doing nothing and looked at me, all together, as if something used their eyes for them at a signal. It was to Mary Gilbraith that I had spoken, while she was at our house-cleaning, and the moment I had chosen was when she was down in the cellar without a candle and I was lying flat on the floor above her, peering down the trap doorway. “Mary,” I said, “they’s a big row of _He’s_ sitting close together inside the wall. They’ve got big foreheads. Bang on the wall and see if they’ll answer--” for I had always longed to bang and had never quite dared. “Oh, my great Scotland!” said Mary Gilbraith, and was up the ladder in a second. That was when they looked at me, and then I knew that I should not have spoken to her about them, and I began to see that there are some things that must not be said. And I felt a kind of shame, too, when Mary turned on me. “You little Miss,” she said wrathfully, “with your big eyes. An’ myself bitin’ on my own nerves for fear of picking up a lizard for a potato. Go play.” “I _was_ playing,” I tried to explain. “Play playthings, then, and not ha’nts,” said Mary. So I never said anything more to her, save about plates and fritters and such things. To this recital Mary Elizabeth listened sympathetically. “There’s just one great big one lives down in our cellar,” she confided in turn. “Not in the wall--but out loose. When the apples and stuff go down there, I always think how glad he is.” “Are you afraid of him?” I asked. “Afraid!” Mary Elizabeth repeated. “Why, no. Once, when I was down there, I tried to pretend there wasn’t anything lived there--and _then_ it was frightening and I was scared.”