 appearance in his fairly-written catalogue. During his business
hours, he indulged himself occasionally with snatches of reading; which were
often, indeed, a necessary part of his pursuit; and as he usually made bold to
carry one of these goblin volumes home at night (always bringing it back again
next morning, in case his strange employer should appear and ask what had become
of it), he led a happy, quiet, studious kind of life, after his own heart.
    But, though the books were never so interesting, and never so full of
novelty to Tom, they could not so enchain him, in those mysterious chambers, as
to render him unconscious, for a moment, of the lightest sound. Any footstep on
the flags without, set him listening attentively, and when it turned into that
house, and came up, up, up, the stairs, he always thought with a beating heart,
»Now I am coming face to face with him, at last!« But no footstep ever passed
the floor immediately below: except his own.
    This mystery and loneliness engendered fancies in Tom's mind, the folly of
which his common sense could readily discover, but which his common sense was
quite unable to keep away, notwithstanding; that quality being with most of us,
in such a case, like the old French Police - quick at detection, but very weak
as a preventive power. Misgivings, undefined, absurd, inexplicable, that there
was some one hiding in the inner room - walking softly overhead, peeping in
through the door-chink, doing something stealthy, anywhere where he was not -
came over him a hundred times a day, making it pleasant to throw up the sash,
and hold communication even with the sparrows who had built in the roof and
water-spout, and were twittering about the windows all day long.
    He sat with the outer door wide open, at all times, that he might hear the
footsteps as they entered, and turned off into the chambers on the lower floor.
He formed odd prepossessions too, regarding strangers in the streets; and would
say within himself of such or such a man, who struck him as having anything
uncommon in his dress or aspect, »I shouldn't wonder, now, if that were he!« But
it never was. And though he actually turned back and followed more than one of
these suspected individuals, in a singular belief that they were going to the
place he was then upon his way from, he never got any other satisfaction by it,
than the satisfaction
