as before. Then, remembering
that the coffin had an invisible occupant, he cried out, "It is my
funeral!" and, with all his strength taken out of him, rode home to
die. All these stories have their own touches of terror; yet I am
inclined to think that my lark rising from the scaffold foot, and
singing to two such auditors, is more terrible than any one of them.

CHRISTMAS

Over the dial-face of the year, on which the hours are months, the apex
resting in sunshine, the base in withered leaves and snows, the finger of
time does not travel with the same rapidity. Slowly it creeps up from
snow to sunshine; when it has gained the summit it seems almost to rest
for a little; rapidly it rushes down from sunshine to the snow. Judging
from my own feelings, the distance from January to June is greater than
from June to January--the period from Christmas to Midsummer seems longer
than the period from Midsummer to Christmas. This feeling arises, I
should fancy, from the preponderance of _light_ on that half of the dial
on which the finger seems to be travelling upwards, compared with the
half on which it seems to be travelling downwards. This light to the
eye, the mind translates into time. Summer days are long, often
wearisomely so. The long-lighted days are bracketed together by a little
bar of twilight, in which but a star or two find time to twinkle.
Usually one has less occupation in summer than in winter, and the
surplusage of summer light, a stage too large for the play, wearies,
oppresses, sometimes appalls. From the sense of time we can only shelter
ourselves by occupation; and when occupation ceases while yet some three
or four hours of light remain, the burden falls down, and is often
greater than we can bear. Personally, I have a certain morbid fear of
those endless summer twilights. A space of light stretching from
half-past 2 A.M. to 11 P.M. affects me with a sense of infinity, of
horrid sameness, just as the sea or the desert would do. I feel that for
too long a period I am under the eye of the taskmaster. Twilight is
always in itself, or at least in its suggestions, melancholy; and these
midsummer twilights are so long, they pass through such series of lovely
change, they are throughout so mournfully beautiful, that in the brain
they beget strange thoughts, and in the heart strange feelings. We see
too much of the sky, and the long, lovely, pathetic, lingering evening
light, with its suggestio