and may be better artists at them than the grooms. The old roan, so famous for crosscountry work, turning his large eyeball to the grated window near his rack, may remember the fresh leaves that glisten there at other times, and the scents that stream in; and may have a fine run with the hounds, while the human helper, clearing out the next stall, never stirs beyond his pitchfork and birch-broom. The grey, whose place is opposite the door, and who, with an impatient rattle of his halter, pricks his ears and turns his head so wistfully when it is opened, and to whom the opener says, "Woa grey, then, steady! Nobody wants you to day!" may know it quite as well as the man. The whole seemingly monotonous and uncompanionable half-dozen, stabled together, may pass the long wet hours, when the door is shut, in livelier communication than is held in the servants' hall, or at the Dedlock Arms-or may even beguile the time by improving (perhaps corrupting) the pony in the loose-box in the corner. So the mastiff, dozing in his kennel, in the courtyard, with his large head on his paws, may think of the hot sunshine, when the shadows of the stable buildings tire his patience out by changing, and leave him, at one time of the day, no broader refuge than the shadow of his own house, where he sits on end, panting and growling short, and very much wanting something to worry, besides himself and his chain. So, now, half-waking, and all-winking, he may recall the house full of company, the coach-houses full of vehicles, the stables full of horses, and the outbuildings full of attendants upon horses, until he is undecided about the present, and comes forth to see how it is. Then, with that impatient shake of himself, he may growl in the spirit, "Rain, rain, rain! Nothing but rain— and no family here!" as he goes in again, and lies down with a gloomy yawn. So with the dogs in the kennel-buildings across the park, who have their restless fits, and whose doleful voices, when the wind has been very obstinate, have even made it known in the house itself: up-stairs, down-stairs, and in my lady's chamber. They may hunt the whole country-side, while the raindrops are pattering round their inactivity. So the rabbits, with their self-betraying tails, frisking in and out of holes at roots of trees, may be lively with ideas of the breezy days when their ears are blown about, or of those seasons of interest when there are sweet young plants to gnaw. The turkey in the poultry-yard, always troubled with a class-grievance (probably Christmas), may be reminiscent of that summer morning wrongfully taken from him, when he got into the lane among the felled trees, where there was a barn and barley. The discontented goose, who stoops to pass under the old gateway, twenty feet high, may gabble out, if we only knew it, a waddling preference for weather when the gateway casts its shadow on the ground. Be this as it may, there is not much fancy otherwise stirring at Chesney Wold. If there be a little at any odd moment, it goes, like a little noise in that old, echoing place, a long way, and usually leads off to ghosts and mystery. Bleak House, Chap. 7. 2 APARTMENT ANNO DOMINI. Mr. Cruncher always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it. Tale of Two Cities, Book II., Chap. I. APARTMENTS-Of Mr. Tartar. Mr. Tartar's chambers were the neatest, the cleanest, and the best-ordered chambers ever seen under the sun, moon, and stars. The floors were scrubbed to that extent that you might have supposed the London blacks emancipated forever and gone out of the land for good. Every inch of brass work in Mr. Tartar's possession was polished and burnished till it shone like a brazen mirror. No speck, nor spot, nor spatter soiled the purity of any of Mr. Tartar's household gods, large, small, or middle-sized His sitting-room was like the admiral's cabin; his bath-room was like a dairy, his sleepingchamber, fitted all about with lockers and drawers, was like a seedsman's shop; and his nicely-balanced cot just stirred in the midst as if it breathed. Everything belonging to Mr. Tartar had quarters of its own assigned to it; his maps and charts had their quarters; his books had theirs; his brushes had theirs; his boots had theirs; his clothes had theirs; his case-bottles had theirs; his telescopes and other instruments had theirs. Everything was readily accessible. Shelf, bracket, locker, hook, and drawer were equally within reach, and were equally contrived with a view to avoiding waste of room, and providing some snug inches of stowage for something that would have exactly fitted nowhere else. His gleaming little service of plate was so arranged upon his sideboard as that a slack salt-spoon would have instantly betrayed itself; his toilet implements were so arranged upon his dressing-table as that a toothpick of slovenly deportment could have been reported at a glance. So with the curiosities he had brought home from various voyages. Stuffed, dried, re-polished, or otherwise preserved, according to their kind; birds, fishes, reptiles, arms, articles of dress, shells, sea weeds, grasses, or memorials of coral reef; each was displayed in its especial place, and each could have been displayed in no better place. Paint and varnish seemed to be kept somewhere out of sight, in constant readiness to obliterate stray fingermarks wherever any might become perceptible in Mr. Tartar's chambers. No man-of-war was ever kept more spick and span from careless touch. On this bright summer day a neat awning was rigged over Mr. Tartar's flower-garden as only a sailor could rig it; and there was a sea-going air upon the whole effect, so delightfully complete that the flower-garden might have appertained to stern-windows afloat, and the whole concern might have bowled away gallantly with all on board, if Mr. Tartar had only clapped to his lips the speaking-trumpet that was slung in a corner, and given hoarse orders to have the anchor up, look alive there, men, and get all sail upon her! Edwin Drood, Chap. 22. APARTMENT-A grim. They mounted up and up, through the musty smell of an old, close house, little used, to a APARTMENT large garret bed-room. Meagre and spare, like all the other rooms, it was even uglier and grimmer than the rest, by being the place of banishment for the worn-out furniture. Its movables were ugly old chairs with worn-out seats, and ugly old chairs without any seats; a threadbare, patternless carpet, a maimed table, a crippled wardrobe, a lean set of fire-irons, like the skeleton of a set deceased, a washing-stand that looked as if it had stood for ages in a hail of dirty soap-suds, and a bedstead with four bare atomies of posts, each terminating in a spike, as if for the dismal accommodation of lodgers who might prefer to impale themselves.-Little Dorrit, Chap. 3. APARTMENTS-Old and abandoned. Mr. Richard Swiveller's apartments were in the neighborhood of Drury Lane, and, in addition to this conveniency of situation, had the advantage of being over a tobacconist's shop, so that he was enabled to procure a refreshing sneeze at any time by merely stepping out on the staircase, and was saved the trouble and expense of maintaining a snuff-box. It was in these apartments that Mr. Swiveller made use of the expressions above recorded, for the consolation and encouragement of his desponding friend; and it may not be uninteresting or improper to remark that even these brief observations partook in a double sense of the figurative and poetical character of Mr. Swiveller's mind, as the rosy wine was in fact represented by one glass of cold gin-and-water, which was replenThe gaunt rooms, deserted for years upon ished, as occasion required, from a bottle and years, seemed to have settled down into a jug upon the table, and was passed from one gloomy lethargy from which nothing could to another, in a scarcity of tumblers which, as rouse them again. The furniture, at once spare Mr. Swiveller's was a bachelor's establishment, and lumbering, hid in the rooms rather than may be acknowledged without a blush. By a furnished them, and there was no color in all like pleasant fiction his single chamber was the house; such color as had ever been there, always mentioned in the plural number. In had long ago started away on lost sunbeams- its disengaged times, the tobacconist had angot itself absorbed, perhaps, into flowers, but-nounced as apartments" for a single gentleterflies, plumage of birds, precious stones, what man, and Mr. Swiveller, following up the hint, There was not one straight floor, from never failed to speak of it as his rooms, his the foundation to the roof; the ceilings were lodgings, or his chambers: conveying to his so fantastically clouded by smoke and dust, hearers a notion of indefinite space, and leavthat old women might have told fortunes in ing their imaginations to wander through long them, better than in grouts of tea; the dead- suites of lofty halls, at pleasure. cold hearths showed no traces of having ever been warmed, but in heaps of soot that had tumbled down the chimneys, and eddied about in little dusky whirlwinds when the doors were opened. In what had once been a drawingroom, there were a pair of meagre mirrors, with dismal processions of black figures carrying black garlands, walking round the frames; but even these were short of heads and legs, and one undertaker-like Cupid had swung round on his own axis and got upside down, and another had fallen off altogether. not. In this flight of fancy, Mr. Swiveller was assisted by a deceptive piece of furniture, in reality a bedstead, but in semblance a bookcase, which occupied a prominent situation in his chamber, and seemed to defy suspicion and challenge inquiry. There is no doubt that, by day, Mr. Swiveller firmly believed this secret convenience to be a bookcase and nothing more; that he closed his eyes to the bed, resolutely denied the existence of the blankets, and spurned the bolster from his thoughts. No word of its real use, no hint of its nightly service, no allusion to its peculiar properties, had ever passed between him and his most intimate friends. Implicit faith in the deception was With these words, the stranger put a thick the first article of his creed. To be the friend square card into Kate's hand, and, turning to of Swiveller you must reject all circumstantial his friend, remarked, with an easy air, "that evidence, all reason, observation, and experithe rooms was a good high pitch;" to which ence, and repose a blind belief in the bookthe friend assented, adding, by way of illustra-case. It was his pet weakness, and he cherishtion, "that there was lots of room for a little ed it.-Old Curiosity Shop, Chap. 7. boy to grow up a man in either on 'em, vithout much fear of his ever bringing his head into contract vith the ceiling." Little Dorrit, Chap. 5. APARTMENT-A spacious. Nicholas Nickleby, Chap. 21. APARTMENT-An ancient. The room into which they entered was a vaulted chamber, once nobly ornamented by cunning architects, and still retaining, in its beautiful groined roof and rich stone tracery, choice remnants of its ancient splendor. Foliage carved in the stone, and emulating the mastery of Nature's hand, yet remained to tell how many times the leaves outside had come and gone, while it lived on unchanged. The broken figures supporting the burden of the chimney-piece, though mutilated, were still distinguishable for what they had been-far different from the dust without-and showed sadly by the empty hearth, like creatures who had outlived their kind, and mourned their own too slow decay. An open door leading to a small room or cell, dim with the light that came through leaves of APARTMENTS 19 APARTMENT vivid likeness passed before him, of a child whom he had held in his arms on the passage across that very Channel, one cold time, when the hail drifted heavily and the sea ran high. The likeness passed away, say, like a breath along the surface of the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which a hospital procession of negro Cupids, several headless, and all cripples, were offering black baskets of Dead Sea ivy, completed the interior of this portion of the ruin. It was not quite destitute of furniture. A few strange chairs, whose arms and legs looked as though they had dwindled away with age; a table, the very spectre of its race; a great old chest that had once held records in the church, with other quaintly-fashioned domestic necessaries, and store of fire-wood for the winter, were scattered around, and gave evident tokens of its occupation as a dwelling-fruit to black divinities of the feminine gender place at no very distant time. Old Curiosity Shop, Chap. 52. APARTMENTS-Dirty. -and he made his formal bow to Miss Manette.-Tale of Two Cities, Chap. 4. APARTMENT-A cozy. It was a prettily furnished room, with a piano, and some lively furniture in red and green, and some flowers. It seemed to be all old nooks and corners; and in every nook and corner there was some queer little table, or cupboard, or book case, or seat, or something or other, that made me think there was not such another good corner in the room; until I looked at the next one, and found it equal to it, if not better. David Copperfield, Chap. 15. This, however, was not the most curious feature of those chambers; that consisted in the profound conviction entertained by my esteemed friend Parkle (their tenant) that they were clean. Whether it was an inborn hallucination, or whether it was imparted to him by Mrs. Miggot, the laundress, I never could ascertain. But I believe he would have gone to the stake upon the question. Now they were so dirty that I could take off the distinctest impression of my figure on any article of furniture by merely lounging upon it for a few moments; and it APARTMENT-Its grandeur in decay. used to be a private amusement of mine to It was spacious enough in all conscience, print myself off-if I may use the expression-occupying the whole depth of the house, and all over the rooms. It was the first large circu- having at either end a great bay-window, as lation I had. At other times I have accident- large as many modern rooms; in which some ally shaken a window curtain while in animated few panes of stained glass, emblazoned with conversation with Parkle, and struggling insects, which were certainly red, and were certainly not ladybirds, have dropped on the back of my hand. Yet Parkle lived in that top set years, bound body and soul to the superstition that they were clean. Uncommercial Traveller, Chap. 14. APARTMENTS-Dusty. There was so much dust in his own faded chambers, certainly, that they reminded me of a sepulchre, furnished in prophetic anticipation of the present time, which had newly been brought to light, after having remained buried a few thousand years. Uncommercial Traveller, Chap. 14. APARTMENT-Mark Tapley's idea of a Jolly. "Jolly sort of lodgings," said Mark, rubbing his nose with the knob at the end of the fireshovel, and looking round the poor chamber: "that's a comfort. The rain's come through the roof too. That ain't bad. A lively old bedstead, I'll be bound; popilated by lots of wampires, no doubt. Come! my spirits is a getting up again. An uncommon ragged nightcap this. A very good sign. We shall do yet!" Martin Chuzzlewit, Chap. 13. APARTMENT-And gloomy furniture. It was a large, dark room, furnished in a funereal manner with black horsehair, and loaded with heavy dark tables. These had been oiled and oiled, until the two tall candles on the table in the middle of the room were gloomily reflected on every leaf; as if they were buried in deep graves of black mahogany, and no light to speak of could be expected from them until they were dug out. fragments of armorial bearings, though cracked, and patched, and shattered, yet remained. attesting, by their presence, that the former owner had made the very light subservient to his state, and pressed the sun itself into his list of flatterers; bidding it, when it shone into his chamber, reflect the badges of his ancient family, and take new hues and colors from their pride. But those were old days, and now every little ray came and went as it would; telling the plain, bare, searching truth. Although the best room of the inn, it had the melancholy aspect of grandeur in decay, and was much too vast for comfort. Rich, rustling hangings, waving on the walls; and, better far, the rustling of youth and beauty's dress; the light of women's eyes, outshining the tapers and their own rich jewels; the sound of gentle tongues, and music, and the tread of maiden feet, had once been there, and filled it with delight. But they were gone, and with them all its gladness. It was no longer a home; children were born and bred there; the fireside had become mercenary-a something to be bought and sold --a very courtezan: let who would die, or sit beside, or leave it, it was still the same-it missed nobody, cared for nobody, had equal warmth and smiles for all. God help the man whose heart ever changes with the world, as an old mansion when it becomes an inn. never No effort had been made to furnish this chilly waste, but before the broad chimney a colony of chairs and tables had been planted on a square of carpet, flanked by a ghostly screen, enriched with figures, grinning and gro tesque.-Barnaby Rudge, Chap. 10. APARTMENT-And furniture. I thought I had never seen such a large room as that into which they showed me. It As his eyes rested on these things, a sudden had five windows, with dark-red curtains that APARTMENT 20 20 APARTMENT every circumstance of Tom's employment there, which had a strange charm in it. Every morn ing, when he shut his door at Islington, he turned his face towards an atmosphere of unaccountable fascination, as surely as he turned it to the London smoke; and from that moment, it thickened round and round him all day long, until the time arrived for going home again, and leaving it, like a motionless cloud, behind. It seemed to Tom, every morning, that he approached this ghostly mist, and became enveloped in it, by the easiest succession of degrees imaginable. Passing from the roar and rattle of the streets into the quiet court-yards of the Temple, was the first preparation. Every echo of his footsteps sounded to him like a sound from the old walls and pavements, wanting language to relate the histories of the dim, dismal rooms; to tell him what lost documents were decaying in forgotten corners of the shutup cellars, from whose lattices such mouldy sighs came breathing forth as he went past; to whisper of dark bins of rare old wine, bricked up in vaults among the old foundations of the Halls; or mutter in a lower tone yet darker le gends of the cross-legged knights, whose mar would have absorbed the light of a general illumination; and there were complications of drapery at the top of the curtains, that went wandering about the wall in a most extraordinary manner. I asked for a smaller room, and they told me there was no smaller room. They could screen me in, however, the landlord said. They brought a great old japanned screen, with natives (Japanese, I suppose), engaged in a variety of idiotic pursuits, all over it; and left me roasting whole before an immense fire. My bedroom was some quarter of a mile off, up a great staircase, at the end of a long gallery; and nobody knows what a misery this is to a bashful man who would rather not meet people on the stairs. It was the grimmest room I have ever had the nightmare in; and all the furniture, from the four posts of the bed to the two old silver candlesticks, was tall, high-shouldered, and spindle-waisted. Below, in my sitting-room, if I looked round my screen, the wind rushed at me like a mad bull; if I stuck to my arm-chair, the fire scorched me to the color of a new brick. The chimney-piece was very high, and there was a bad glass-what I may call a wavy glass-above it, which, when I stood up, just showed me my anterior phre-ble effigies were in the church. With the first nological developments-and these never look well, in any subject, cut short off at the eyebrow. If I stood with my back to the fire, a gloomy vault of darkness above and beyond the screen insisted on being looked at; and, in its dim remoteness, the drapery of the ten curtains of the five windows went twisting and creeping about, like a nest of gigantic worms. I suppose that what I observe in myself must be observed by some other men of similar character in themselves; therefore I am emboldened to mention, that, when I travel, I never arrive at a place but I immediately want to go away from it.-The Holly Tree. APARTMENT-The hangings of an. A mouldering reception-room, where the faded hangings, of a sad sea-green, had worn and withered until they looked as if they might have claimed kindred with the waifs of seaweed drifting under the windows, or clinging to the walls, and weeping for their imprisoned relations.-Little Dorrit, Book II., Chap. 6. APARTMENT. planting of his foot upon the staircase of his APARTMENT-A mouldy. Certain wintry branches of candles on the high chimney-piece faintly lighted the chamber; or, it would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness. It was spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together. An epergne or centrepiece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders The lady whom they had come to see, if she with blotchy bodies running home to it, and were the present occupant of the house, appear-running out from it, as if some circumstance of ed to have taken up her quarters there, as she the greatest public importance had just transmight have established herself in an Eastern pired in the spider community. caravanserai. A small square of carpet in the middle of the room, a few articles of furniture that evidently did not belong to the room, and a disorder of trunks and travelling articles, formed the whole of her surroundings. Under some former regular inhabitant, the stifling little apartment had broken out into a pier-glass and a gilt table; but the gilding was as faded as last year's flowers, and the glass was so clouded that it seemed to hold in magic preservation all the fogs and bad weather it had ever reflected. Little Dorrit, Book I., Chap 27 APARTMENTS-The ghostly air of. There was a ghostly air about these uninhabited chambers in the Temple. and attending Great Expectations, Chap. 11 APARTMENT-To let; its advantages. "I believe, sir," said Richard Swiveller, taking his pen out of his mouth, "that you desire to look at these apartments. They are very charming apartments, sir. They command an uninterrupted view of-of over the way, and they are within one minute's walk of-of the corner of the street. There is exceedingly mild porter, sir, in the immediate vicinity, and the contingent advantages are extraordinary." Old Curiosity Shop, Chap. 34. APARTMENT-A snug. "An uncommon snug little box, this," said Mr. Lenville, stepping into the front room, and APARTMENT taking his hat off before he could get in at all. "Pernicious snug." "For a man at all particular in such matters, it might be a trifle too snug," said Nicholas; "for, although it is, undoubtedly, a great convenience to be able to reach anything you want from the ceiling or the floor, or either side of the room, without having to move from your chair, still these advantages can only be had in an apartment of the most limited size." Nicholas Nickleby, Chap. 24. APARTMENT-Of a Suicide. a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what APARTMENT-The Growlery of Jarndyce. The air of the room is almost bad enough to have extinguished it, if he had not. It is a small room, nearly black with soot, and grease, and dirt. In the rusty skeleton of a grate, pinched at the middle as if Poverty had gripped it, a red coke fire burns low. In the corner by the chimney, stand a deal table and a broken desk; a wilderness marked with a rain of ink. In another corner, a ragged old portmanteau on one of the two chairs, serves for APARTMENT-in a cosy tavern. cabinet or wardrobe; no larger one is needed, for it collapses like the cheeks of a starved man. The floor is bare; except that one old mat, trodden to shreds of rope-yarn, lies perishing upon the hearth. No curtain veils the darkness of the night, but the discolored shutters are drawn together; and through the two gaunt holes pierced in them, famine might be staring in-the Banshee of the man upon the bed. "You must be here very seldom, sir," said I. "O, you don't know me!" he returned. "When I am deceived or disappointed in-the wind, and it's Easterly, I take refuge here. The Growlery is the best-used room in the house!" Bleak House, Chap. 8. For, on a low bed opposite the fire-a confusion of dirty patch-work, lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking-the lawyer, hesitating just within the doorway, sees a man. He lies there, dressed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look in the spectral darkness of a candle that has guttered down, until the whole length of its wick (still burning) has doubled over, and left a tower of winding-sheet above it. His hair is ragged, mingling with his whiskers and his beard-the latter, ragged too, and grown, like the scum and mist around him, in neglect. Foul and filthy as the room is, foul and filthy as the air is, it is not easy to perceive what fumes those are which most oppress the senses in it; but through the general sickliness and faintness, and the odor of stale tobacco, there comes into the lawyer's mouth the bitter, vapid taste of opium. "Hallo, my friend!" he cries, and strikes his iron candlestick against the door. He thinks he has awakened his friend. He lies a little turned away, but his eyes are surely open. It was one of those unaccountable little rooms which are never seen anywhere but in a tavern, and are supposed to have got into taverns by reason of the facilities afforded to the architect for getting drunk while engaged in their construction. It had more corners in it than the brain of an obstinate man; was full of mad closets, into which nothing could be put that was not specially invented and made for that purpose; had mysterious shelvings and bulk-heads, and indications of staircases in the ceiling; and was elaborately provided with a bell that rung in the room itself, about two feet from the handle, and had no connection whatever with any other part of the establishment. It was a little below the pavement, and abutted close upon it; so that passengers grated against the window-panes with their buttons, and scraped it with their baskets; and fearful boys suddenly coming between a thoughtful guest and the light, derided him; or put out their tongues as if he were a physician; or made white knobs on the ends of their noses by flattening the same against the glass, and vanished awfully, like spectres. Martin Chuzzlewit, Chap. 35. APARTMENT-Mr. Fips' office. In a very dark passage on the first floor, oddly situated at the back of a house, they found a little blear-eyed glass door up in one corner, with MR. FIPS painted on it in characters which were meant to be transparent. There was also a wicked old sideboard hiding in the gloom hard by, meditating designs upon the ribs of visitors; and an old mat worn into lattice work, which, being useless as a mat (even if anybody could have seen it, which was impossible), had for many years directed its industry into another channel, and regularly tripped up every one of Mr. Fips' clients. Martin Chuzzlewit, Chap. 39. APARTMENT-A model bedroom. It was none of your frivolous and preposterously bright bedrooms, where nobody can close an eye with any kind of propriety or decent regard to the associations of ideas; but it was a good, dull, leaden, drowsy place, where every article of furniture reminded you that you came |