THE RECTOR'S NIGHT-WALK TO HIS CHURCH.


A.D. 1767--in the beginning of the month of May--I mention it because,
as I said, I write from memoranda, an awfully dark night came down on
Chapelizod and all the country round.

I believe there was no moon, and the stars had been quite put out under
the wet 'blanket of the night,' which impenetrable muffler overspread
the sky with a funereal darkness.

There was a little of that sheet-lightning early in the evening, which
betokens sultry weather. The clouds, column after column, came up
sullenly over the Dublin mountains, rolling themselves from one horizon
to the other into one black dome of vapour, their slow but steady motion
contrasting with the awful stillness of the air. There was a weight in
the atmosphere, and a sort of undefined menace brooding over the little
town, as if unseen crime or danger--some mystery of iniquity--was
stealing into the heart of it, and the disapproving heavens scowled a
melancholy warning.

That morning old Sally, the rector's housekeeper, was disquieted. She
had dreamed of making the great four-post, state bed, with the dark
green damask curtains--a dream that betokened some coming trouble--it
might, to be sure, be ever so small--(it had once come with no worse
result than Dr. Walsingham's dropping his purse, containing something
under a guinea in silver, over the side of the ferry boat)--but again it
might be tremendous. The omen hung over them doubtful.

A large square letter, with a great round seal, as big as a crown piece,