Turning, I made my way down the short staircase, and was about to leave the house when the third door, as yet unopened, caught my eye.  I drew with some difficulty the rusted bolt, and found myself at the head of a steep flight of stairs, seemingly longer than that which I had just descended.  It led to the cellar, and though the afternoon was getting on, I thought I would finish my exploration, and therefore went down, though repelled by the close and peculiarly damp air.  The cellar was blasted and hewn in the solid rock to a depth which, considering the extreme hardness of the stone, seemed remarkable in a house so unpretending.  A dim light made its way through a narrow window at each end and fell upon the stone floor.  I walked forward, looking up at the windows, but I had not taken ten steps before I recoiled with a start.  At my feet lay a pit, seemingly of considerable depth, and filled with water to within four feet of the top.  The cellar did not lie under the kitchen, but only under the two front rooms and the passage, and this pit occupied the whole length and fully half the breadth of the space of the rooms above, and, what was more peculiar, seemed to extend even farther forward than the house itself.  Another step, and I should have fallen into it.  Curious to try its depth, I picked up a little fragment of stone and dropped it in.  As the stone touched the water, and the circles on the sullen surface began to widen, a current of air rushed down the stairs, and the door above shut violently.  At that moment the impression which I had experienced in the room above came back upon me with tenfold distinctness, and was accompanied with a feeling of exceeding horror.  It seemed as if there was closing around me some evil influence, from which I could only escape by instant flight.  For one moment I resisted the unreasonable terror, and made an attempt to explain, or at least analyze, a sensation so unwonted:  the next, the loathing dread grew too strong.  I turned and hurried across the damp floor, up the narrow stairs, and, opening the door, made my way as quickly as possible into the outside air.  The dog was waiting for me in the little shed, and seemed delighted at seeing me again.  I closed the door, ashamed of my senseless fright, but nevertheless I was thankful that I had found no trouble in getting out.  I am not quite prepared to say, however, that these sudden and apparently unreasonable starts are independent of external causes.  The Vermont-bred horse will be thrown into an agony of fright when the closed cage of a lion passes by, though he has never learned by experience that lions will kill horses, and though the lion himself is unseen.

I walked briskly home.  I had some distance to go, and had quite lost the impression of my ghostly terror when I reached the house where I was staying, a modern shingle Gothic erection, which in vain endeavored to disguise its barny appearance with sundry wooden adornments modeled after crochet-work.