The Riddle and Other Stories/The Bird of Travel

THE BIRD OF TRAVELWE had been talking of houses—their looks and ways and influences. What shallow defences they were, we agreed, even for the materialist, with their brittle glass, and baked clay bricks; and what mere fungi most of them. Worse still—the dreadful species that isn't haunted at all, not even by the graces or disgraces of its inmates—mere barracks deaf to life and insensitive even to the weathers of heaven. A cherry-eyed little man of the name of Bateson, I remember, told us of a house he had known that had year by year gently and furtively shifted itself a few feet down its valley towards the sea. A full green mile to go. He said it was the property of a family so fair of skin and hair as to be almost albinos—but still, a happy one.
Somebody capped this with the ancient yarn of Lord Montberris, who built a new wing to his family edifice every year, till the estate was utterly ruined. Whereupon he set fire to the place in the vain hope of getting rid of its Devil that way. And at last a quaint old creature whose name I have forgotten, but who, so I was told, had been something of a versifier in his younger days, told us the following rather pointless story, about a ho

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