forget a
certain house in the Quadrant where a visitor died, and a dark old woman
continued to dwell alone with the dead body; nor how this old woman
conceived a hatred to myself and one of my cousins, and in the dread hour
of the dusk, as we were clambering on the garden-walls, opened a window
in that house of mortality and cursed us in a shrill voice and with a
marrowy choice of language. It was a pair of very colourless urchins that
fled down the lane from this remarkable experience! But I recall with a
more doubtful sentiment, compounded out of fear and exultation, the coil
of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of rain; the
boats with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbour mouth, where
danger lay, for it was hard to make when the wind had any east in it; the
wives clustered with blowing shawls at the pier-head, where (if fate was
against them) they might see boat and husband and sons--their whole
wealth and their whole family--engulfed under their eyes; and (what I saw
but once) a troop of neighbours forcing such an unfortunate homeward, and
she squalling and battling in their midst, a figure scarcely human, a
tragic Maenad.

These are things that I recall with interest; but what my memory dwells
upon the most, I have been all this while withholding. It was a sport
peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of our two months'
holiday there. Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot; for boys
and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable to man; so
that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular like the sun
and moon; and the harmless art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the
Roman empire and the rise of the United States. It may still flourish in
its native spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; for I tried myself
to introduce it on Tweedside, and was defeated lamentably; its charm
being quite local, like a country wine that cannot be exported.

The idle manner of it was this:--

Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and the
nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective
villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was so
well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and
the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our
particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a
cricket belt, and over them, such was the rig