ment. And before Dousterswivel
had fairly recovered his legs, he had mentally sworn the ruin of his
benefactor, which, unfortunately, he possessed too much the power of
accelerating.

But although a purpose of revenge floated through his brain, it was
no time to indulge such speculations. The hour, the place, his own
situation, and perhaps the presence or near neighbourhood of his
assailants, made self-preservation the adept's first object. The lantern
had been thrown down and extinguished in the scuffle. The wind, which
formerly howled so loudly through the aisles of the ruin, had now
greatly fallen, lulled by the rain, which was descending very fast.
The moon, from the same cause, was totally obscured, and though
Dousterswivel had some experience of the ruins, and knew that he must
endeavour to regain the eastern door of the chancel, yet the confusion
of his ideas was such, that he hesitated for some time ere he could
ascertain in what direction he was to seek it. In this perplexity, the
suggestions of superstition, taking the advantage of darkness and his
evil conscience, began again to present themselves to his disturbed
imagination. "But bah!" quoth he valiantly to himself, "it is all
nonsense all one part of de damn big trick and imposture. Devil! that
one thick-skulled Scotch Baronet, as I have led by the nose for five
year, should cheat Herman Dousterswivel!"

As he had come to this conclusion, an incident occurred which tended
greatly to shake the grounds on which he had adopted it. Amid the
melancholy sough of the dying wind, and the plash of the rain-drops on
leaves and stones, arose, and apparently at no great distance from the
listener, a strain of vocal music so sad and solemn, as if the departed
spirits of the churchmen who had once inhabited these deserted ruins
were mourning the solitude and desolation to which their hallowed
precincts had been abandoned. Dousterswivel, who had now got upon his
feet, and was groping around the wall of the chancel, stood rooted to
the ground on the occurrence of this new phenomenon. Each faculty of his
soul seemed for the moment concentred in the sense of hearing, and all
rushed back with the unanimous information, that the deep, wild, and
prolonged chant which he now heard, was the appropriate music of one of
the most solemn dirges of the Church of Rome. Why performed in such
a solitude, and by what class of choristers, were questions which
the terrified imagination o