The wind moaned through the ancestral trees; the old house creaked
as with ghostly footsteps; the curtains of his bed seemed to waver. He
was now at home; yes, he had found his home, and was sheltered at last
under the ancestral roof after all those long, long wanderings,--after
the little log-built hut of the early settlement, after the straight roof
of the American house, after all the many roofs of two hundred years,
here he was at last under the one which he had left, on that fatal night,
when the Bloody Footstep was so mysteriously impressed on the threshold.
As he drew nearer and nearer towards sleep, it seemed more and more to
him as if he were the very individual--the self-same one throughout the
whole--who had done, seen, suffered, all these long toils and
vicissitudes, and were now come back to rest, and found his weariness so
great that there could he no rest.
Nevertheless, he did sleep; and it may be that his dreams went on, and
grew vivid, and perhaps became truer in proportion to their vividness.
When he awoke he had a perception, an intuition, that he had been
dreaming about the cabinet, which, in his sleeping imagination, had again
assumed the magnitude and proportions of a stately mansion, even as he
had seen it afar from the other side of the Atlantic. Some dim
associations remained lingering behind, the dying shadows of very vivid
ones which had just filled his mind; but as he looked at the cabinet,
there was some idea that still seemed to come so near his consciousness
that, every moment, he felt on the point of grasping it.
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