had covered the faces of men known to history, and reverenced when not
a piece of distinguishable dust remained of them; personages whom
tradition told about; and here, mixed up with successive crops of
native-born Americans, had been ministers, captains, matrons, virgins
good and evil, tough and tender, turned up and battened down by the
sexton's spade, over and over again; until every blade of grass had its
relations with the human brotherhood of the old town. A hundred and
fifty years was sufficient to do this; and so much time, at least, had
elapsed since the first hole was dug among the difficult roots of the
forest trees, and the first little hillock of all these green beds was
piled up.

Thus rippled and surged, with its hundreds of little billows, the old
graveyard about the house which cornered upon it; it made the street
gloomy, so that people did not altogether like to pass along the high
wooden fence that shut it in; and the old house itself, covering ground
which else had been sown thickly with buried bodies, partook of its
dreariness, because it seemed hardly possible that the dead people
should not get up out of their graves and steal in to warm themselves
at this convenient fireside. But I never heard that any of them did so;
nor were the children ever startled by spectacles of dim horror in the
night-time, but were as cheerful and fearless as if no grave had ever
been dug. They were of that class of children whose material seems
fresh, not taken at second hand, full of disease, conceits, whims, and
weaknesses, that have already served many people's turns, and been
moulded up, with some little change of combination, to serve the turn
of some poor spirit that could not get a better case.

So far as ever came to the present writer's knowledge, there was no
whisper of Doctor Grimshawe's house being haunted; a fact on which both