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The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard
page 48 of 429 (11%)
They retreated with a less staid pace than usual, and I sought Aunt
Mercy, who was preparing the Sunday's dinner. Twilight drew near, and
the Sunday's clouds began to fall on my spirits. Between sundown and
nine o'clock was a tedious interval. I was not allowed to go to bed,
nor to read a secular book, or to amuse myself with anything. A dim
oil-lamp burned on the high shelf of the middle room, our ordinary
gathering-place. Aunt Mercy sat there, rocking in a low chair; the
doors were open, and I wandered softly about. The smell of the
garden herbs came in faintly, and now and then I heard a noise in
the water-butt under the spout, the snapping of an old rafter, or
something falling behind the wall. The toads crawled from under the
plantain leaves, and hopped across the broad stone before the kitchen
door, and the irreverent cat, with whom I sympathized, raced like mad
in the grass. Growing duller, I went to the cellar door, which was in
the front entry, opened it, and stared down in the black gulf, till
I saw a gray rock rise at the foot of the stairs which affected my
imagination. The foundation of the house was on the spurs of a great
granite bed, which rose from the Surrey shores, dipped and cropped
out in the center of Barmouth. It came through the ground again in the
woodhouse, smooth and round, like the bald head of some old Titan, and
in the border of the garden it burst through in narrow ridges full
of seams. As I contemplated the rock, and inhaled a moldy atmosphere
whose component parts were charcoal and potatoes, I heard the first
stroke of the nine o'clock bell, which hung in the belfry of the
church across the street. Although it was so near us that we could
hear the bellrope whistle in its grooves, and its last hoarse breath
in the belfry, there was no reverberation of its clang in the house;
the rock under us struck back its voice. It was an old Spanish bell,
Aunt Mercy told me. How it reached Barmouth she did not know. I
recognized its complaining voice afterward. It told me it could never
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