ration. There lay the dead I had left, the two or
three students of the Seminary; the son of the worthy pair in whose house
I lived, for whom in those days hearts were still aching, and by whose
memory the house still seemed haunted. A few upright stones were all
that I recollect. But now, around them were the monuments of many of the
dead whom I remembered as living. I doubt if there has been a more
faithful reader of these graven stones than myself for many a long day.
I listened to more than one brief sermon from preachers whom I had often
heard as they thundered their doctrines down upon me from the throne-like
desk. Now they spoke humbly out of the dust, from a narrower pulpit, from
an older text than any they ever found in Cruden's Concordance, but there
was an eloquence in their voices the listening chapel had never known.
There were stately monuments and studied inscriptions, but none so
beautiful, none so touching, as that which hallows the resting-place of
one of the children of the very learned Professor Robinson: "Is it well
with the child? And she answered, It is well."

While I was musing amidst these scenes in the mood of Hamlet, two old
men, as my little ghost called them, appeared on the scene to answer to
the gravedigger and his companion. They christened a mountain or two for
me, "Kearnsarge" among the rest, and revived some old recollections, of
which the most curious was "Basil's Cave." The story was recent, when I
was there, of one Basil, or Bezill, or Buzzell, or whatever his name
might have been, a member of the Academy, fabulously rich, Orientally
extravagant, and of more or less lawless habits. He had commanded a cave
to be secretly dug, and furnished it sumptuously, and there with his
companions indulged in revelries such as the daylight of that consecrated
locality had never looked upon. How much truth there was in it all I
will not pretend to say, but I seem to remember stamping over every rock
that sounded hollow, to question if it were not the roof of what was once
Basil's Cave.

The sun was getting far past the meridian, and I sought a shelter under
which to partake of the hermit fare I had brought with me. Following the
slope of the hill northward behind the cemetery, I found a pleasant clump
of trees grouped about some rocks, disposed so as to give a seat, a
table, and a shade. I left my benediction on this pretty little natural
caravansera, and a brief record on one of its wh