ing me to the test.

I stood alone by the grave. Mr. Bernard had taken leave of me; the
workers and the idlers in the churchyard had alike departed. There was
no reason why I should not follow them; and yet I remained, with my eyes
fixed upon the freshly-turned earth at my feet, thinking of the dead.

Some time had passed thus, when the sound of approaching footsteps
attracted my attention. I looked up, and saw a man, clothed in a long
cloak drawn loosely around his neck, and wearing a shade over his eyes,
which hid the whole upper part of his face, advancing slowly towards me,
walking with the help of a stick. He came on straight to the grave, and
stopped at the foot of it--stopped opposite me, as I stood at the head.

"Do you know me again?" he said. "Do you know me for Robert Mannion?" As
he pronounced his name, he raised the shade and looked at me.

The first sight of that appalling face, with its ghastly discolouration
of sickness, its hideous deformity of feature, its fierce and changeless
malignity of expression glaring full on me in the piercing noonday
sunshine--glaring with the same unearthly look of fury and triumph which
I had seen flashing through the flashing lightning, when I parted from
him on the night of the storm--struck me speechless where I stood, and
has never left me since. I must not, I dare not, describe that frightful
sight; though it now rises before my imagination, vivid in its horror
as on the first day when I saw it--though it moves hither and thither
before me fearfully, while I write; though it lowers at my window,
a noisome shadow on the radiant prospect of earth, and sea, and sky,
whenever I look up from the page I am now writing towards the beauties
of my cottage view.

"Do you know me for Robert Mannion?" he repeated. "Do you know the
work of your own hands, now you see it? Or, am I changed to you past
recognition, as _your_ father might have found _my_ father changed,
if he had seen him on the morning of his execution, standing under the
gallows, with the cap over his face?"

Still I could neither speak nor move. I could only look away from him in
horror, and fix my eyes on the ground.

He lowered the shade to its former position on his face, then spoke
again.

"Under this earth that we stand on," he said, setting his foot on the
grave; "down here, where you are now looking, lies buried with the
buried dead, the last influence which might one day have gained you
respite and