Outside the east window of my room stood a giant wellingtonia on the lawn, its head rising level with the upper sash.  It grew some twenty feet away, planted on the highest terrace, and I often saw it when closing my curtains for the night, noticing how it drew its heavy skirts about it, and how the light from other windows threw glimmering streaks and patches that turned it into the semblance of a towering, solemn image.  It stood there then so strikingly, somehow like a great old-world idol, that it claimed attention.  Its appearance was curiously formidable.  Its branches rustled without visibly moving and it had a certain portentous, forbidding air, so grand and dark and monstrous in the night that I was always glad when my curtains shut it out.  Yet, once in bed, I had never thought about it one way or the other, and by day had certainly never sought it out.

One night, then, as I went to bed and closed this window against a cutting easterly wind, I saw—­that there were two of these trees.  A brother wellingtonia rose mysteriously beside it, equally huge, equally towering, equally monstrous.  The menacing pair of them faced me there upon the lawn.  But in this new arrival lay a strange suggestion that frightened me before I could argue it away.  Exact counterpart of its giant companion, it revealed also that gross, odious quality that all my sister’s paintings held.  I got the odd impression that the rest of these trees, stretching away dimly in a troop over the farther lawns, were similar, and that, led by this enormous pair, they had all moved boldly closer to my windows.  At the same moment a blind was drawn down over an upper room; the second tree disappeared into the surrounding darkness.

It was, of course, this chance light that had brought it into the field of vision, but when the black shutter dropped over it, hiding it from view, the manner of its vanishing produced the queer effect that it had slipped into its companion—­almost that it had been an emanation of the one I so disliked, and not really a tree at all!  In this way the garden turned vehicle for expressing what lay behind it all ...!

The behavior of the doors, the little, ordinary doors, seems scarcely worth mention at all, their queer way of opening and shutting of their own accord; for this was accountable in a hundred natural ways, and to tell the truth, I never caught one in the act of moving.  Indeed, only after frequent repetitions did the detail force itself upon me, when, having noticed one, I noticed all.  It produced, however, the unpleasant impression of a continual coming and going in the house, as though, screened cleverly and purposely from actual sight, some one in the building held constant invisible intercourse with—­others.

Upon detailed descriptions of these uncertain incidents I do not venture, individually so trivial, but taken all together so impressive and so insolent.  But the episode of the children, mentioned above, was different.  And I give it because it showed how vividly the intuitive child-mind received the impression—­one impression, at any rate—­of what was in the air.  It may be told in a very few words.  I believe they were the coachman’s children, and that the man had been in Mr. Franklyn’s service; but of neither point am I quite positive.