o claimed a burying-place and sought to mix their ashes
with the dust of men. Hard by these gravestones of dead years, and
forming a part of the ruin which some pains had been taken to render
habitable in modern times, were two small dwellings with sunken windows
and oaken doors, fast hastening to decay, empty and desolate.

Upon these tenements, the attention of the child became exclusively
riveted. She knew not why. The church, the ruin, the antiquated
graves, had equal claims at least upon a stranger's thoughts, but from
the moment when her eyes first rested on these two dwellings, she could
turn to nothing else. Even when she had made the circuit of the
enclosure, and, returning to the porch, sat pensively waiting for their
friend, she took her station where she could still look upon them, and
felt as if fascinated towards that spot.

CHAPTER 47

Kit's mother and the single gentleman--upon whose track it is expedient
to follow with hurried steps, lest this history should be chargeable
with inconstancy, and the offence of leaving its characters in
situations of uncertainty and doubt--Kit's mother and the single
gentleman, speeding onward in the post-chaise-and-four whose departure
from the Notary's door we have already witnessed, soon left the town
behind them, and struck fire from the flints of the broad highway.

The good woman, being not a little embarrassed by the novelty of her
situation, and certain material apprehensions that perhaps by this time
little Jacob, or the baby, or both, had fallen into the fire, or
tumbled down stairs, or had been squeezed behind doors, or had scalded
their windpipes in endeavouring to allay their thirst at the spouts of
tea-kettles, preserved an uneasy silence; and meeting from the window
the eyes of turnpike-men, omnibus-drivers, and others, felt in the new
dignity of her position like a mourner at a funeral, who, not being
greatly afflicted by the loss of the departed, recognizes his every-day
acquaintance from the window of the mourning coach, but is constrained
to preserve a decent solemnity, and the appearance of being indifferent
to all external objects.

To have been indifferent to the companionship of the single gentleman
would have been tantamount to being gifted with nerves of steel. Never
did chaise inclose, or horses draw, such a restless gentleman as he.
He never sat in the same position for two minutes together, but was
perpetually tossing his arms an