Roanoke of Roanoke Hall: A Romance — page 112: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

106 Roanoke of Roanoke Han. uninterrupted view of the chamber below, and a singular exhibition it was which met my astonished gaze. At a table in the centre, covered by num- berless little piles of gold, calmly consulting and comparing account books in the most rational and business-like way, sat Stephen Ashland, the old man who, when I had en- countered him, appeared to be a hopeless lunatic. Nor was the evening to pass away without furnishing me with ample and con- _vineing proof that this dotage of his was a cunning mask purposely assumed to cover his smuggling transactions and who knows what other villainies. I was so absorbed in the contemplation of this remarkable spectacle that I did not at first observe that the silence was broken by other sounds than the scratching of the old man’s pen and the chink of the coins as he moved them to and.fro; but I presently be- came aware that footsteps were echoing along the secret passage, and were then even close at hand. That my capture in a spot of whose very existence I was supposed to be ignorant comichbooks.com