Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle

By Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

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Thirty years ago, an elderly man, to whom I paid quarterly a small annu-

ity charged on some property of mine, came on the quarter-day to receive

it. He was a dry, sad, quiet man, who had known better days, and had al-

ways maintained an unexceptionable character. No better authority could

be imagined for a ghost story.

He told me one, though with a manifest reluctance; he was drawn into the

narration by his choosing to explain what I should not have remarked, that

he had called two days earlier than that week after the strict day of payment,

which he had usually allowed to elapse. His reason was a sudden determina-

tion to change his lodgings, and the consequent necessity of paying his rent

a little before it was due.

He lodged in a dark street in Westminster, in a spacious old house, very

warm, being wainscoted from top to bottom, and furnished with no undue

abundance of windows, and those fitted with thick sashes and small panes.

This house was, as the bills upon the windows testified, offered to be sold or

let. But no one seemed to care to look at it.

3 JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU

A thin matron, in rusty black silk, very taciturn, with large, steady, alarmed

eyes, that seemed to look in your face, to read what you might have seen in

the dark rooms and passages through which you had passed, was in charge of

it, with a solitary "maid-of-all-work" under her command. My poor friend

had taken lodgings in this house, on account of their extraordinary cheap-

ness. He had occupied them for nearly a year without the slightest distur-

bance, and was the only tenant, under rent, in the house. He had two rooms;

a sitting-room and a bed-room with a closet opening from it, in which he

kept his books and papers locked up. He had gone to his bed, having also

locked the outer door. Unable to sleep, he had lighted a candle, and af-

ter having read for a time, had laid the book beside him. He heard the

old clock at the stairhead strike one; and very shortly after, to his alarm, he

saw the closet-door, which he thought he had locked, open stealthily, and

a slight dark man, particularly sinister, and somewhere about fifty, dressed

in mourning of a very antique fashion, such a suit as we see in Hogarth, en-

tered the room on tip-toe. He was followed by an elder man, stout, and

blotched with scurvy, and whose features, fixed as a corpse's, were stamped

with dreadful force with a character of sensuality and villany.

This old man wore a flowered silk dressing-gown and ruffles, and he re-

marked a gold ring on his finger, and on his head a cap of velvet, such as,

in the days of perukes, gentlemen wore in undress.

This direful old man carried in his ringed and ruffled hand a coil of rope;

and these two figures crossed the floor diagonally, passing the foot of his

bed, from the closet door at the farther end of the room,

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HHPL6WYL
• ISBN13: 9798182730334
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Pasco Library
• Length: 50 Pages
• Weight: 0.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"