So the girl had died and been buried. We were told of an illness that
had seized her the very day after our last preceding visit; but we
inquired not into the particulars.
And now come I to the conclusion of my story, and to the most singular
part of it. The evening of the third day afterward, Wheaton, who had
wept scalding tears, and Brown, whose cheeks had recovered their
color, and myself, that for an hour thought my heart would never
rebound again from the fearful shock--that evening, I say, we three
were seated around a table in another tavern, drinking other beer,
and laughing but a little less cheerfully, and as though we had never
known the widow or her daughter--neither of whom, I venture to affirm,
came into our minds once the whole night, or but to be dismiss'd
again, carelessly, like the remembrance of faces seen in a crowd.
Strange are the contradictions of the things of life! The seventh day
after that dreadful visit saw my brother Matthew--the delicate one,
who, while bold men writhed in torture, had kept the same placid face,
and the same untrembling fingers--him that seventh day saw a clay-cold
corpse, carried to the repose of the churchyard. The shaft, rankling
far down and within, wrought a poison too great for show, and the
youth died.
THE CHILD AND THE PROFLIGATE
Just after sunset, one evening in summer--that pleasant hour when the
air is balmy, the light loses its glare, and all around is imbued with
soothing quiet--on the door-step of a house there sat an elderly woman
waiting the arrival of her son.
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