Then the old woman, with an air of mystery which drew the circle closer
round the fire, informed them that she had provided her grave-clothes
some years before--a nice linen shroud, a cap with a muslin ruff, and
everything of a finer sort than she had worn since her wedding day. But
this evening an old superstition had strangely recurred to her. It used
to be said, in her younger days, that if anything were amiss with a
corpse, if only the ruff were not smooth, or the cap did not set right,
the corpse in the coffin and beneath the clods would strive to put up
its cold hands and arrange it. The bare thought made her nervous.

'Don't talk so, grandmother!' said the girl, shuddering.

'Now'--continued the old woman, with singular earnestness, yet smiling
strangely at her own folly--'I want one of you, my children--when
your mother is dressed and in the coffin---I want one of you to hold
a looking-glass over my face. Who knows but I may take a glimpse at
myself, and see whether all's right?'

'Old and young, we dream of graves and monuments,' murmured the stranger
youth. 'I wonder how mariners feel when the ship is sinking, and
they, unknown and undistinguished, are to be buried together in the
ocean--that wide and nameless sepulchre?'

For a moment, the old woman's ghastly conception so engrossed the minds
of her hearers that a sound abroad in the night, rising like the roar
of a blast, had grown broad, deep, and terrible, before the fated
group were conscious of it. The house and all within it trembled; the
foundations of the earth seemed to be shaken, as if this awful sound
were the peal of the last trump. Young and old exchanged one wild