ve been
shivered to fragments; and, lighting on its edge, stuck upright like a
miniature obelisk, in the soft green sward beyond. None of the
Philosophies or the Logics would have sanctioned the inference which I
immediately drew; but that curious chapter in the history of human
belief which treats of signs and omens abounds in such postulates and
such conclusions. I at once inferred that recovery awaited me: I was "to
live and not die;" and felt lighter, during the few weeks I afterwards
toiled at this place, under the cheering influence of the conviction.

The tenant of the farm on which our work was situated, and who had been
both a great distiller and considerable fanner in his day, had become
bankrupt shortly before, and was on the eve of quitting the place, a
broken man. And his forlorn circumstances seemed stamped on almost every
field and out-house of his farm. The stone fences were ruinous; the
hedges gapped by the almost untended cattle; a considerable sprinkling
of corn-ears lay rotting on the lea; and here and there an entire sheaf,
that had fallen from the "leading-cart" at the close of harvest, might
be seen still lying among the stubble, fastened to the earth by the
germination of its grains. Some of the out-houses were miserable beyond
description. There was a square of modern offices, in which the cattle
and horses of the farm--appropriated by the landlord, at the time under
the law of hypothec--were tolerably well lodged; but the hovel in which
three of the farm-servants lived, and in which, for want of a better, my
master and I had to cook and sleep, was one of the most miserable
tumble-down erections I ever saw inhabited. It had formed part of an
ancient set of offices that had been condemned about fourteen years
before; but the proprietor of the place becoming insolvent, it had been
spared, in lack of a better, to accommodate the servants who wrought on
the farm; and it had now become not only a comfortless, but also a very
unsafe dwelling. It would have formed no bad subject, with its bulging
walls and gapped roof, that showed the bare ribs through the breaches,
for the pencil of my friend William Koss; but the cow or horse that had
no better shelter than that which it afforded could not be regarded as
other than indifferently lodged. Every heavier shower found its way
through the roof in torrents: I could even tell the hour of the night by
the stars which passed over the long opening that ran along