Page:Doctor Grimshawe's Secret (1883).djvu/377

Note 1. Author's note.—"No longer could play at quarter-staff with Ned."

Note 2. Author's note.—"Referring to places and people in England: the Bloody Footstep sometimes."

Note 3. In the original the following occurs, but marked to indicate that it was to be omitted: "And kissed his hand to her, and laughed feebly; and that was the last that she or anybody, the last glimpse they had of Doctor Grimshawe alive."

Note 4. Author's notes.—"A great deal must be made out of the spiders, and their gloomy, dusky, flaunting tapestry. A web across the orifice of his inkstand every morning; everywhere, indeed, except across the snout of his brandy-bottle.—Depict the Doctor in an old dressing-gown, and a strange sort of a cap, like a wizard's.—The two children are witnesses of many strange experiments in the study; they see his moods, too.—The Doctor is supposed to be writing a work on the Natural History of Spiders. Perhaps he used them as a blind for his real project, and used to bamboozle the learned with pretending to read them passages in which great learning seemed to be elaborately worked up, crabbed with Greek and Latin, as if the topic drew into itself, like a whirlpool, all that men thought and knew; plans to cultivate cobwebs on a large scale. Sometimes, after overwhelming them with astonishment in this way, he would burst into one of his laughs. Schemes to make the world a cobweb-factory, etc., etc. Cobwebs in his own brain. Crusty Hannah such a mixture of persons and races as could be found only at a seaport. There was