In accordance with the arrangements we had made the night before, Colonel Crockett had arrived at Amity Street shortly after breakfast time, driving the handsome chaise so generously furnished to him by his exceedingly accommodating host. Climbing onto the seat beside the frontiersman, I had found him in freshly restored spirits, his buoyant mood undamped by die cold and constant drizzle that fell from the overhanging clouds.

Following a journey of some twenty-five minutes through the damp and cheerless streets, we arrived at our destination. Occupying almost the entirety of a city block, the Nicodemus estate was encompassed by a ponderous wall of solid brick. Crouched atop the gateposts of this lofty rampart were two carved, glowering creatures with leonine torsos, vulture wings, heads like those of snarling dragons, and the taloned legs of eagles.

Passing between these exceptionally fanciful sculptures—which loomed like the ferocious chimeras that guard the portals of ancient Near-Eastern temples—we proceeded along a curving pathway, canopied by die overspreading branches of many gigantic, gnarled trees, and at length found ourselves in a cobblestoned courtyard, gazing upward at the strange—the grotesque—the wildly idiosyncratic—exterior of the fabled house of Nicodemus.

While Crockett climbed down from the carriage and tethered the reins to an elaborately wrought hitching post, I stared in silent wonderment at the façade of this singular edifice. Its owner and principal designer, Josiah Nicodemus, had led a life of far-flung maritime adventure in his youth and early manhood, first as a cabin boy, then a common sailor, until—ascending by degrees through the ranks of third, second, and chief mate—he had at length become captain of the whaling vessel Grampus. In these various capacities he had voyaged to every part of the globe, viewing at first hand the glory that was Greece—the grandeur that was Rome—the exotic splendor of the East—the savage beauty of darkest Africa—and the paradisaical charm of the Polynesian tropics.

After retiring from the sea, Nicodemus had invested his savings in the shipbuilding trade, eventually achieving a success that surpassed his wildest hopes. Wealthy beyond measure, he had set about to construct a residence that would re-create the combined wonders of all the sights that had so bedazzled his senses in his youth. This singular ambition was realized in the remarkable building that now loomed before me, whose design was characterized by a discordant—if not utterly bizarre—juxtaposition of architectural embellishments, from medieval battlements, to Corinthian columns, to Oriental minarets, to the sort of elaborately scrolled buttresses characteristic of the Italian baroque—the entire, unparalleled combination giving to the whole an air of Arabian Nights fantasticalness, as though the building had sprung full-blown from the teeming reveries of an inordinately imaginative child.