his grave, and remembered well by those who had been in his service,
not a few of whom lived in the neighbourhood of the forsaken
building.

One gusty afternoon, like the first, but late in the spring, Robert
repaired as usual to this his secret haunt. He had played for some
time, and now, from a sudden pause of impulse, had ceased, and begun
to look around him. The only light came from two long pale cracks
in the rain-clouds of the west. The wind was blowing through the
broken windows, which stretched away on either hand. A dreary,
windy gloom, therefore, pervaded the desolate place; and in the
dusk, and their settled order, the machines looked multitudinous.
An eerie sense of discomfort came over him as he gazed, and he
lifted his violin to dispel the strange unpleasant feeling that grew
upon him. But at the first long stroke across the strings, an awful
sound arose in the further room; a sound that made him all but drop
the bow, and cling to his violin. It went on. It was the old, all
but forgotten whirr of bobbins, mingled with the gentle groans of
the revolving horizontal wheel, but magnified in the silence of the
place, and the echoing imagination of the boy, into something
preternaturally awful. Yielding for a moment to the growth of
goose-skin, and the insurrection of hair, he recovered himself by a
violent effort, and walked to the door that connected the two
compartments. Was it more or less fearful that the jenny was not
going of itself? that the figure of an old woman sat solemnly
turning and turning the hand-wheel? Not without calling in the jury
of his senses, however, would he yield to the special plea of his
imagination, but went nearer, half expecting to find that the mutch,
with its big flapping borders, glimmering white in the gloom across
many a machine, surrounded the face of a skull. But he was soon