"Dickens, Charles - The Haunted Man And The Ghost's Bargain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickens Charles)

of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it
was the manner of a haunted man?

Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave,
with a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed to set
himself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of a
haunted man?

Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part
laboratory, - for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a
learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a
crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily, - who that had seen him
there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and
instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous
beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes
raised there by the flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects
around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels
that held liquids), trembling at heart like things that knew his
power to uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to
fire and vapour; - who that had seen him then, his work done, and
he pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame,
moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead,
would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber
too?

Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed that
everything about him took this haunted tone, and that he lived on
haunted ground?

His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like, - an old, retired part
of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted
in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten
architects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side
by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well,
with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very
pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time,
had been constructed above its heavy chimney stalks; its old trees,
insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop so low
when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-
plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to win
any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to the
tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a
stray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook it
was; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where no sun had
straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the
sun's neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere
else, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top,
when in all other places it was silent and still.

His dwelling, at its heart and core - within doors - at his