SILHOUETTES.



I fear I must be of a somewhat gruesome turn of mind. My sympathies
are always with the melancholy side of life and nature. I love the
chill October days, when the brown leaves lie thick and sodden
underneath your feet, and a low sound as of stifled sobbing is heard
in the damp woods--the evenings in late autumn time, when the white
mist creeps across the fields, making it seem as though old Earth,
feeling the night air cold to its poor bones, were drawing ghostly
bedclothes round its withered limbs. I like the twilight of the long
grey street, sad with the wailing cry of the distant muffin man. One
thinks of him, as, strangely mitred, he glides by through the gloom,
jangling his harsh bell, as the High Priest of the pale spirit of
Indigestion, summoning the devout to come forth and worship. I find
a sweetness in the aching dreariness of Sabbath afternoons in genteel
suburbs--in the evil-laden desolateness of waste places by the river,
when the yellow fog is stealing inland across the ooze and mud, and
the black tide gurgles softly round worm-eaten piles.

I love the bleak moor, when the thin long line of the winding road
lies white on the darkening heath, while overhead some belated bird,
vexed with itself for being out so late, scurries across the dusky
sky, screaming angrily. I love the lonely, sullen lake, hidden away
in mountain solitudes. I suppose it was my childhood's surroundings
that instilled in me this affection for sombre hues. One of my
earliest recollections is of a dreary marshland by the sea. By day,