were never to be awakened. For as by
some secret sympathy, both sickened on the same day--of the same
fever--and died at the same hour;--and not from any dim intention of
those who buried them, but accidentally, and because the burial-ground
of the Minister and the Elder adjoined, were they buried almost in the
same grave--for not half a yard of daisied turf divided them--a curtain
between the beds on which brother and sister slept.

In their delirium they both talked about each other--Mary Morrison and
Harry Wilton--yet their words were not words of love, only of common
kindness; for although on their death-beds they did not talk about
death, but frequently about that May-day Festival, and other pleasant
meetings in neighbours' houses, or in the Manse. Mary sometimes rose up
in bed, and in imagination joined her voice to that of the flute which
to his lips was to breathe no more; and even at the very self-same
moment--so it wonderfully was--did he tell all to be hushed, for that
Mary Morrison was about to sing the Flowers of the Forest.

Methinks that no deep impressions of the past, although haply they may
sleep for ever, and seem as if they had ceased to be, are ever utterly
obliterated; but that they may, one and all, reappear at some hour or
other however distant, legible as at the very moment they were first
engraven on the memory. Not by the power of meditation are the long-ago
vanished thoughts or emotions restored to us, in which we found delight
or disturbance; but of themselves do they seem to arise, not undesired
indeed, but unbidden, like sea-birds that come unexpectedly floating up
into some inland vale, because, unknown to us who wonder at them, the
tide is flowing and the breezes blow from the main. Bright as the living
image stands now before us the ghost--for what else is it than the
ghost--of Mary Morrison, just as she stood before us on one particular
day--in one particular place, innumerable years ago! It was at the close
of one of those midsummer days which melt away into twilight, rather
than into night, although the stars are visible, and bird and beast
asleep. All by herself, as she walked along between the braes, was she
singing a hymn,--

"And must this body die?
This mortal frame decay?
And must these feeble limbs of mine
Lie mouldering in the clay?"

Not that the child had any thought of death, for she was as full of life
as the star above her was of lustre--tamed th