"Why are you here all alone, cousin? How cold and still it is amongst
the graves!"

"Sit down beside me, Blanche: it is not colder in the churchyard than on
the village green."

And Blanche sat down beside me, nestled close to me, and leaned her head
upon my shoulder. We were both long silent. It was an evening in the
early spring, clear and serene; the roseate streaks were fading
gradually from the dark gray of long, narrow, fantastic clouds. Tall,
leafless poplars, that stood in orderly level line on the lowland
between the churchyard and the hill, with its crown of ruins, left their
sharp summits distinct against the sky. But the shadows coiled dull and
heavy round the evergreens that skirted the churchyard, so that their
outline was vague and confused; and there was a depth in that lonely
stillness, broken only when the thrush flew out from the lower bushes,
and the thick laurel-leaves stirred reluctantly, and again were rigid in
repose. There is a certain melancholy in the evenings of early spring
which is among those influences of Nature the most universally
recognized, the most difficult to explain. The silent stir of reviving
life, which does not yet betray signs in the bud and blossom, only in a
softer clearness in the air, a more lingering pause in the slowly
lengthening day; a more delicate freshness and balm in the twilight
atmosphere; a more lively, yet still unquiet, note from the birds,
settling down into their Coverts; the vague sense under all that hush,
which still outwardly wears the bleak sterility of winter, of the busy
change, hourly, modestly, at work, renewing the youth of the world, re-
clothing with vigorous bloom the skeletons of things,--all these
messages from the heart of Nature to the heart of Man may well affect