"The Picture in the House" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft. It was written on December 12, 1920, and first published in the July 1919 issue of The National Amateur which actually was published in the summer of 1921. Synopsis: The story is narrated by a lone traveller (a genealogist conducting research), riding on his bicycle in the Miskatonic Valley of rural New England, who seeks shelter from an approaching storm in an apparently abandoned house, only to find that it is occupied by a "loathsome old, white-bearded, and ragged man," speaking in "an extreme form of Yankee dialect...thought long extinct", whose face is "abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect". "His height could not have been less than six feet."...