I said it again, and I said it slower.
"Swear it!" she cried, getting more and more excited.
I preserved my gravity (the canal was just visible in the distance), and swore it.
"Are you satisfied now?" I asked.
There was no answer. Her last resources of speech were exhausted. The strange creature looked back again straight between the pony's ears, emitted hoarsely a grunt of relief, and never more looked at me, never more spoke to me, for the rest of the journey. We drove past the banks of the canal, and I escaped immersion. We rattled, in our jingling little vehicle, through the streets and across the waste patches of ground, which I dimly remembered in the darkness, and which looked more squalid and more hideous than ever in the broad daylight. The chaise turned down a lane, too narrow for the passage of any larger vehicle, and stopped at a wall and a gate that were new objects to me. Opening the gate with her key, and leading the pony, Ariel introduced me to the back garden and yard of Miserrimus Dexter's rotten and rambling old house. The pony walked off independently to his stable, with the chaise behind him. My silent companion led me through a bleak and barren kitchen, and along a stone passage. Opening a door at the end, she admitted me to the back of the hall, into which Mrs. Macallan and I had penetrated by the front entrance to the house. Here Ariel lifted a whistle which hung around her neck, and blew the shrill trilling notes with the sound of which I was already familiar as the means of communication between Miserrimus Dexter and his slave. The whistling over, the slave's unwilling lips struggled into speech for the last time.
"Wait till you hear the Master's whistle," she said; "then go upstairs."
So! I was to be whistled for like a dog! And, worse still, there was no help for it but to submit like a dog. Had Ariel any excuses to make? Nothing of the sort.
She turned her shapeless back on me and vanished into the kitchen region of the house.
After waiting for a minute or two, and hearing no signal from the floor above, I advanced into the broader and brighter part of the hall, to look by daylight at the pictures which I had only imperfectly discovered in the darkness of the night. A painted inscription in many colors, just under the cornice of the ceiling, informed me that the works on the walls were the production of the all-accomplished Dexter himself. Not satisfied with being poet and composer, he was painter as well. On one wall the subjects were described as "Illustrations of the Passions;" on the other, as "Episodes in the Life of the Wandering Jew." Chance speculators like myself were gravely warned, by means of the inscription, to view the pictures as efforts of pure imagination. "Persons who look for mere Nature in works of Art" (the inscription announced) "are persons to whom Mr. Dexter does not address himself with the brush. He relies entirely on his imagination. Nature puts him out."