An Affair with the Caretaker

I was able to make out the letters N. W. 3/4 to C.-
a reference clearly enough to points of the compass and
a distance. The word ravine was scrawled over a rough
outline of a doorway or opening of some sort, and then
the phrase: THE DOOR OF BEWILDERMENT Now I am rather an imaginative person; that is why
engineering captured my fancy. It was through his trying
to make an architect (a person who quarrels with
women about their kitchen sinks!) of a boy who wanted
to be an engineer that my grandfather and I failed to hit
it off. From boyhood I have never seen a great bridge or
watched a locomotive climb a difficult hillside without
a thrill; and a lighthouse still seems to me quite the
finest monument a man can build for himself. My
grandfather's devotion to old churches and medieval
houses always struck me as trifling and unworthy of a
grown man. And fate was busy with my affairs that
night, for, instead of lighting my pipe with the little
sketch, I was strangely impelled to study it seriously.

I drew for myself rough outlines of the interior of
Glenarm House as it had appeared to me, and then I
tried to reconcile the little sketch with every part of
it.

"The Door of Bewilderment" was the charm that held
me. The phrase was in itself a lure. The man who had
built a preposterous house in the woods of Indiana and
called it "The House of a Thousand Candles" was quite
capable of other whims; and as I bent over this scrap of
paper in the candle-lighted library it occurred to me
that possibly I had not done justice to my grandfather's
genius. My curiosity was thoroughly aroused as to the
hidden corners of the queer old house, round which the
wind shrieked tormentingly.