Once more I was astride of a long narrow stone. And now I found that it was
an ancient gravestone which I knew well in a certain Sussex churchyard, the
top of it carved into the rough resemblance of a human skeleton--that of a
man, tradition said, who had been killed by a serpent that came out of a
bottomless pool in the next field. How long I sat there I do not know; but
at last I saw the faint gray light of morning begin to appear in front of
me. The horse of death had carried me eastward. The dawn grew over the top
of a hill that here rose against the horizon. But it was a wild dreary
dawn--a blot of gray first, which then stretched into long lines of dreary
yellow and gray, looking more like a blasted and withered sunset than a
fresh sunrise. And well it suited that waste, wide, deserted churchyard, if
churchyard I ought to call it where no church was to be seen--only a vast
hideous square of graves. Before me I noticed especially one old grave, the
flat stone of which had broken in two and sunk in the middle. While I sat
with my eyes fixed on this stone, it began to move; the crack in the middle
closed, then widened again as the two halves of the stone were lifted up,
and flung outward, like the two halves of a folding door. From the grave
rose a little child, smiling such perfect contentment as if he had just
come from kissing his mother. His little arms had flung the stones apart,
and as he stood on the edge of the grave next to me, they remained
outspread from the action for a moment, as if blessing the sleeping people.
Then he came towards me with the same smile, and took my hand. I rose, and
he led me away over another broken wall towards the hill that lay before
us. And as we went the sun came nearer, the pale yellow bars flushed into
orange and rosy red, till at length the edges of the clouds were swept with
an agony of golden light, which even my dreamy eyes could not endure, and I
awoke weeping for joy.

This waking woke my wife, who said in some alarm: