he would have done, on and on to the
most far-off funeral day. From that one chair, close to the bedside, he
never rose. Night after night, when all the vale was hushed, he never
slept. Through one of the midnights there had been a great thunderstorm,
the lightning smiting a cliff close to the cottage; but it seemed that
he heard it not--and during the floods of next day, to him the roaring
vale was silent. On the morning of the funeral, the old people--for now
they seemed to be old--wept to see him sitting still beside their dead
child; for each of the few remaining hours had now its own sad office,
and a man had come to nail down the coffin. Three black specks suddenly
alighted on the face of the corpse--and then off--and on--and away--and
returning--was heard the buzzing of large flies, attracted by beauty in
its corruption. "Ha--ha!" starting up, he cried in horror--"What birds
of prey are these, whom Satan has sent to devour the corpse?" He became
stricken with a sort of palsy--and, being led out to the open air, was
laid down, seemingly as dead as her within, on the green daisied turf,
where, beneath the shadow of the sycamore, they had so often sat,
building up beautiful visions of a long blissful life.

The company assembled--but not before his eyes--the bier was lifted up
and moved away down the sylvan slope, and away round the head of the
Lake, and over the wooden bridge, accompanied, here and there, as it
passed the wayside houses on the road to Grassmere, by the sound of
psalms--but he saw--he heard not;--when the last sound of the spade
rebounded from the smooth arch of the grave, he was not by--but all the
while he was lying where they left him, with one or two pitying dalesmen
at his head and feet. When he awoke again and rose up, the cottage of
the Fold was as if she had never been born--for she had vanished for
ever and aye, and her sixteen years' smiling life was all extinguished
in the dust.

Weeks and months passed on, and still there was a vacant wildness in his
eyes, and a mortal ghastliness all over his face, inexpressive of a
reasonable soul. It scarcely seemed that he knew where he was, or in
what part of the earth, yet, when left by himself, he never sought to
move beyond the boundaries of the Fold. During the first faint
glimmerings of returning reason, he would utter her name, over and over
many times, with a mournful voice, but still he knew not that she was
dead--then he began to caution t