Rokeby Woods. I climbed very leisurely up the hill-side, having in my
hand a bag with a meal, and up the stair in the wall to the top I went,
where there is no parapet, but a massiveness of wall that precludes
danger; and here in my miner's attire I sat three hours, brooding
sleepily upon the scene of lush umbrageous old wood that marks the long
way the river takes, from Marwood Chase up above, and where the rapid
Balder bickers in, down to bowery Rokeby, touched now with autumn; the
thickness of trees lessening away toward the uplands, where there are
far etherealized stretches of fields within hedgerows, and in the sunny
mirage of the farthest azure remoteness hints of lonesome moorland. It
was not till near three that I went down along the river, then, near
Rokeby, traversing the old meadow, and ascending the old hill: and
there, as of old, was the little black square with yellow letters on the
gate-wall:

HUNT HILL HOUSE.

No part, no house, I believe, of this country-side was empty of strange
corpses: and they were in Hunt Hill, too. I saw three in the weedy plot
to the right of the garden-path, where once the hawthorn and lilac tree
had grown from well-rollered grass, and in the little bush-wilderness to
the left, which was always a wilderness, one more: and in the
breakfast-room, to the right of the hall, three; and in the new wooden
clinker-built attachment opening upon the breakfast-room, two, half
under the billiard-table; and in her room overlooking the porch on the
first floor, the long thin form of my mother on her bed, with crushed-in
left temple, and at the foot of the bed, face-downward on the floor,
black-haired Ada in a night-dress.

Of all the men and women who died, they two alone had burying. For I