So far was he fortunate; and slipshod in worsted of wife Christian's own working, who so little thought, as she pleased herself with the reflection of the softness for his feet, that she was to be cheated thereby, he slipped gently down the steps on this enterprise he had revolved in his mind for years and years of bygone time. Come to the identical old door. He had examined it often by candle-light before; and as for the rusty hasp and staple, and appended padlock, he knew them well, with all their difficulties to even smith's hands of his horny manipulation. He laid down the glimmering candle and paused. What a formidable object of occlusion, that door by which no one had entered for twenty years! Geordie knew nothing of the old notion, that time fills secret and vacant recesses with terrified ghosts, frightened away from the haunts of men; yet he had strange misgivings, which, being the instinctive suggestions of a rude mind, had a better chance for being true to nature. Perhaps the cold night air, to which his shirt offered small impediment, helped his tremulousness; and that was not diminished when, on seizing the padlock, a scream from some drunken unfortunate in the Wynd struck on his ear and died away in the midnight silence. Nor was he free from the pangs of conscience, as he thought of the injunctions of guidwife Christian, and, more than these, the sanctions of morality and the laws; but then he was not a thief,--only an antiquary, searching into a dungeon of time-hallowed curiosities and relics. He laid his hard hand on the rusty padlock. He was accustomed to the screech of old bolts, but that now was as if it came from some of Vulcan's chains whereby he caught the old thieves. The key-hole was entirely filled up with red rust, which, like silence stuffing up the mouth, had kept the brain-works unimpaired; so it needed no long time till, through his cunning crooks, he heard the nick of the receding bolt. A tug brought up the hasp, and now all ought to have been clear; but it was otherwise. Time, with his warpings and accumulating glues, had been there too long--the door would not give way, even to a smith's right hand; but Geordie had a potency in his back, before which other unwilling impediments of the same kind, sometimes with a debtor's resistance at the other side, had given way. That potency he applied; and the groan of the hinges responding fearfully to his ears, the vision was at length realized, of that door standing open for the passage of human beings.