hide. By persons who claimed a superiority to popular prejudice it was
reckoned merely an eccentric whim, such as often mingles with the
sober actions of men otherwise rational and tinges them all with its
own semblance of insanity. But with the multitude good Mr. Hooper was
irreparably a bugbear. He could not walk the street with any peace of
mind, so conscious was he that the gentle and timid would turn aside
to avoid him, and that others would make it a point of hardihood to
throw themselves in his way. The impertinence of the latter class
compelled him to give up his customary walk at sunset to the
burial-ground; for when he leaned pensively over the gate, there would
always be faces behind the gravestones peeping at his black veil. A
fable went the rounds that the stare of the dead people drove him
thence. It grieved him to the very depth of his kind heart to observe
how the children fled from his approach, breaking up their merriest
sports while his melancholy figure was yet afar off. Their instinctive
dread caused him to feel more strongly than aught else that a
preternatural horror was interwoven with the threads of the black
crape. In truth, his own antipathy to the veil was known to be so
great that he never willingly passed before a mirror nor stooped to
drink at a still fountain lest in its peaceful bosom he should be
affrighted by himself. This was what gave plausibility to the whispers
that Mr. Hooper's conscience tortured him for some great crime too
horrible to be entirely concealed or otherwise than so obscurely
intimated. Thus from beneath the black veil there rolled a cloud into
the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor
minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him. It was said
that ghost and fiend consorted with him there. With self-shudderings
and outward terrors he walked continually in its shadow, groping
darkly within his own soul or gazing through a medium that saddened
the whole world. Even the lawless wind, it was believed, respected his