had always,
until that hour, kept it within my own breast that I dreamed every night
of the dear lost one. But in the letter that I wrote I recorded the
circumstance, and added that I felt much interested in proving whether
the subject of my dream would still be faithful to me, travel-tired, and
in that remote place. No. I lost the beloved figure of my vision in
parting with the secret. My sleep has never looked upon it since, in
sixteen years, but once. I was in Italy, and awoke (or seemed to awake),
the well-remembered voice distinctly in my ears, conversing with it. I
entreated it, as it rose above my bed and soared up to the vaulted roof
of the old room, to answer me a question I had asked touching the Future
Life. My hands were still outstretched towards it as it vanished, when I
heard a bell ringing by the garden wall, and a voice in the deep
stillness of the night calling on all good Christians to pray for the
souls of the dead; it being All Souls' Eve.

To return to the Holly-Tree. When I awoke next day, it was freezing
hard, and the lowering sky threatened more snow. My breakfast cleared
away, I drew my chair into its former place, and, with the fire getting
so much the better of the landscape that I sat in twilight, resumed my
Inn remembrances.

That was a good Inn down in Wiltshire where I put up once, in the days of
the hard Wiltshire ale, and before all beer was bitterness. It was on
the skirts of Salisbury Plain, and the midnight wind that rattled my
lattice window came moaning at me from Stonehenge. There was a hanger-on
at that establishment (a supernaturally preserved Druid I believe him to
have been, and to be still), with long white hair, and a flinty blue eye
always looking afar off; who claimed to have been a shepherd, and who
seemed to be ever watching for the reappearance, on the verge of the
horizon, of some ghostly flock of sheep that had been mutton for many
ages. He was a man with a weird belief in him that no one could count
the stones of Stonehenge twice, and make the same number of them;
likewise, that any one who counted them three times nine times, and then
stood in the centre and said, "I dare!" would behold a tremendous
apparition, and be stricken dead. He pretended to have seen a bustard (I
suspect him to have been familiar with the dodo), in manner following: He
was out upon the plain at the close of a late autumn day, when he dimly
discerned, going on before him at a cu