Our good woman probably passed around the foundation walls of the great chimney, where was a flue for ashes, passed the potato-bins and turnip covers, and, with peering eyes, looked down on one of the many platforms for barrels.
Cellars were haunted places. There was an awful story of a woman who murdered her husband, and hid his body under the ash barrel, that had taken hold of popular imagination in those revengeful times, and most people thought of it as they made their uncertain ways around the cellars. It was all poky and still, grewsome and tomb-like.
Our good woman heard a noise. That was not strange. Cats and rats dwelt in the cellar, and the latter came out of their hiding-places when the former were not at home.
She was ill prepared for what followed.
There arose up before her an awful object. Whatever ghost-stories she may have heard by kitchen fires in the long evenings, she had never had any account of anything like this.
Its body was like that of Apollyon, as represented in the never-to-be-forgotten picture in the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” But it wore the feathers of a goose.
Erupit! evasit! Our good woman ascended the cellar stairs with a celerity that spoke well for the power of latent nervous force. The dreadful figure followed her, begging for mercy, and confessing that he was Darby the Impostor. The poor woman supplied his wants, and probably provided him with a suit of clothes, when he disappeared from society forever.
MADISON STREET.