The Novels and Romances of a E Bray

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. 'Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. SHAKSFEABE. The apartment into which the pilgrim had been conducted to pass the night was perfectly in character with the rest of the building. It was old, vast, and decaying....
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. 'Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. SHAKSFEABE. The apartment into which the pilgrim had been conducted to pass the night was perfectly in character with the rest of the building. It was old, vast, and decaying. The high windows (in many parts without the least remains of glass in them) shook, as the wind whistled through their apertures in melancholy cadence. The massy door creaked harshly on its rusty hinges, as every now and then some gust of air rushed upon it; helping to produce those night noises which unconsciously affect the spirits, while the cause of them is not always easily to be accounted for. The bed that was to give repose to the weary stranger, we have already noticed. An old table, a bench, and a stool formed of the cork-tree, supplied the rest of the furniture. One piece of ancient Moorish magnificence still remained, too remarkable to be here omitted, as it was most probably a vestige of the original decorations of the place. It consisted of a brazen arm and hand as large as life, represented clad in mail, every ring of which was finely worked and finished. The arm projected from a small recess in the wall?the hand held a lamp; some old drapery, so disposed as to appear like the robe of a person to whom it might belong, hung round the arm, and thus concealed its fastening to the wall. There was, to delicate nerves, something frightful in this accompaniment of a sleeping chamber, whose gloom was only in part dispelled by the feeble light of the lamp. To a fanciful imagination it might appear like the hand of an armed man about to pass into the apartment, and who thus held extended a light to survey it with caution before he thrust in his whole body. Th...