[1] A work of surrealist art and literature, it is typical of Gorey's avant-garde style of storytelling, with Victorian and Edwardian-esque line drawings and settings, each described with a sentence fragment which adds to a larger continuous narrative.

Although internally consistent, coherent, and structured, the story has a disjointed and disorienting quality, with melancholic and morbidly humorous effects.

Another man then leaves the house and gives "the Throbblefoot Spectre" a length of string, before going to the statue of "Corrupted Endeavour" to wait for autumn.

After this, the story stays outside the house, and we see several characters enacting their own obscure dramas (including a woman who throws herself from a parapet, and three people in a dinghy on a lake to whom Echo (not depicted) speaks), in a panoramic and seemingly endless rural landscape.

The story ends as three people visit a "kiosk" (depicted much like a bandstand) for tea and cakes.