August: the hum of insects in the fragrant grass, the flutter of birds
amid the delicate green of boughs checkered by playful sunbeams and gentle
shadows, and ever in sight of the resorts of busy workday man,--walls,
roof-tops, church-spires rising high; there, white and modern, the
handwriting of our race, in this practical nineteenth century, on its
square plain masonry and Doric shafts, the Town-Hall, central in the
animated marketplace. And I--I--prying into long-neglected corners and
dust-holes of memory for what my reason had flung there as worthless
rubbish; reviving the jargon of French law, in the proces verbal, against
a Gille de Retz, or an Urbain Grandier, and sifting the equity of
sentences on witchcraft!

Bursting the links of this ghastly soliloquy with a laugh at my own folly,
I struck into a narrow path that led back towards the city, by a quiet and
rural suburb; the path wound on through a wide and solitary churchyard, at
the base of the Abbey-hill. Many of the former dwellers on that eminence
now slept in the lowly burial-ground at its foot; and the place,
mournfully decorated with the tombs which still jealously mark
distinctions of rank amidst the levelling democracy of the grave, was kept
trim with the care which comes half from piety, and half from pride.

I seated myself on a bench, placed between the clipped yew-trees that
bordered the path from the entrance to the church porch, deeming vaguely
that my own perplexing thoughts might imbibe a quiet from the quiet of the
place.

"And oh," I murmured to myself, "oh that I had one bosom friend to whom I
might freely confide all these torturing riddles which I cannot
solve,--one who could read my heart, light up its darkness, exorcise its
spectres; one in whose wisdom I could welcome a guide through the Nature