le
bench in front of the cabin. The cool air of the night soon brought me
to myself, and while in my confused state I wondered if the whole might
not be some dreadful dream, my eyes once more fell upon the figure of
the woman, who still knelt in the attitude we had first seen her. Her
hands were clasped before her, and from time to time her wild cry
rose into the air and woke the echoes of that silent valley. A faint
moonlight lay in broken patches around her, and mingled its beams with
the red glare of the little candles within, as their light fell upon her
marble features. From the cabin I could hear the sounds of the priest's
voice, as he continued to pray without ceasing.

As the hours rolled on, nothing changed; and when, prompted by
curiosity, I looked within the hovel, I saw the priest still kneeling
beside the bed, his face pale and sunk and haggard, as though months of
sickness and suffering had passed over him. I dared not speak; I dared
not disturb him; and I sat down near the door in silence.

It is one of the strange anomalies of our nature that the feelings which
rend our hearts with agony have a tendency, by their continuance, to
lull us into slumber. The watcher by the bedside of his dying friend,
the felon in his cell but a few hours before death, sleep--and sleep
soundly. The bitterness of grief would seem to blunt sensation, and the
mind, like the body, can only sustain a certain amount of burden, after
which it succumbs and yields. So I found it amid this scene of horror
and anguish, with everything to excite that can operate upon the
mind--the woman stricken motionless and senseless by grief; the dead
man, as it were, recalled to life by the words that were to herald
him into life everlasting; the old man, whom I had known but as a gay
companion, displayed now before my eyes in all the workings of his
feeling heart, called up by the afflictions of one world and the
terrors of another--and this in a wild and dreary valley, far from man's
dwelling. Yet amid all this, and more than all, the harassing conviction
that some deed of blood, some dark hour of crime, had been here at work,
perhaps to be concealed for ever, and go unavenged save of Heaven--with
this around and about me, I slept. How long I know not; but when I woke,
the mist of morning hung in the valley, or rolled in masses of cloudlike
vapour along the mountain-side. In an instant the whole scene of the
previous night was before me, and the