The flowers that early die! A. deep and holy calm fell upon Uncle Timothy, with a sweet assurance that a happier meeting with departed friends was not far distant. And as the guardianship of ministering angels was his firm belief and favourite theme, his secret prayer at this solemn moment was, that they might save him from the bodily and mental infirmities, the selfishness and apathy of protracted years. He read the inscriptions over again, with a full conviction of their truthfulness. _They were his own._ At an obscure corner--and afar off--_Truth_, for a wonder, had written an epitaph upon one who loved, not his _species_, but his _specie!_ Beneath this stone old Nicholas lies; Nobody laughs, and nobody cries. Where he's gone, and how he fares, Nobody knows, and nobody cares! And at no great distance was a tomb entirely overgrown with rank weeds, nettles, and thorns; and there was a superstitious legend attached to it, that they all grew up in one night, and though they had been several times rooted up, still, in one night, they all grew up again! Stones had been ignominiously cast upon it; and certain ancient folks of the village gravely affirmed that, on the anniversary of the burial of the miserable crone, the _Black Sanctus_ * was performed by herself and guardian spirits! * Isaac Reed informs us (see note upon Chapman's Widow's Tears, in Dodsley's Old Plays) that “the _Black Sanctus_ was a hymn to Saint Satan, written in ridicule of Monkish luxury.” And Tarlton (see News out of Purgatory) quotes it in “the Tale of Pope Boniface.” “And' upon this there was a general mourning through all Rome: the cardinals wept, the abbots howled, the monks rored, the fryers cried, the nuns puled, the curtezans lamented, the bels rang, the tapers were lighted, that such a Blacke Sanctus was not seene a long time afore in Rome.”, The Black Sanctus here said to be performed was of a different kind. It was assuredly “a hymn to Satan,” in which the crone and the most favoured of her kindred took the base; Hypocrisy leading the band, and Avarice scraping the fiddle. “The rest God knows--perhaps the Devil” A yew-tree stretched forth its bare branches over the tomb, which in one night also became withered and blasted! [Illustration: 0226]