It was a warm night at the beginning of March. The air was calm and still; the bright moon was shedding her pure light with unusual brilliancy on the city, lying directly underneath her beams. On the pinnacles of the time-honoured cathedral; on the church-spire, whose tapering height has made itself a name; on the clustering roofs of houses; on the trees of what people are pleased to call the Park; on the river, silently winding its course along beneath the city walls; and on the white pavement of its streets: all were steeped in the soft and beautiful light of the Queen of Night. Surely at that late hour people ought to have been asleep in their beds, and the town hushed to silence! Not so. A vast number of men--and women too, for the matter of that--were awake and abroad. At least, it looked a good number, stealing quietly in one direction along the principal street. A few persons, comparatively speaking, assembled together by daylight, will look like a crowd at night. They went along for the most part in silence, one group glancing round at another, and being glanced at, back again: whether drawn out by curiosity, by sympathy, by example, all seemed very much as if they were half ashamed to be seen there. Straight through the town, past the new law-courts, past the squares and the good houses built in more recent years, past the pavements and the worn highway, telling of a city's bustle, into the open country, to where a churchyard abuts upon a side-road. A rural, not much frequented churchyard, dotted with old graves, its small, grey church standing in the middle. People were not buried there now. On one side of the church yard, open to the side way, the boundary hedge had disappeared, partly through neglect. The entrance was on the other side, facing the city; and where was the use of raising up again the trodden-down hedge, destroyed gradually and in process of time by boys and girls at play? So, at least, argued the authorities--when they argued about it at all. People were not buried there now: and yet a grave was being dug. At the remotest corner of this open side of the churchyard, so close to the consecrated ground that you could scarcely tell whether they were on it or off it, two men with torches were working at the nearly finished, shallow, hastily-made grave. A pathway, made perhaps more of custom than of plan, led right over it into the churchyard--if any careless person chose to enter it by so unorthodox a route--and the common side-road, wide enough to admit of carts and other vehicles, crossed it on the exact spot where the grave was being dug. So that a spectator might have said the grave's destined occupant was to lie in a cross-road.