A little farther on, but in full view of its stunted cypresses and white headstones, was the cottage. Of burial grounds generally I have no dread, but from this particular one I was accustomed, even from a child, to turn away with something of superstitious horror. I could never forget how Laura Hastings saw a light burning there all one winter night, after the death of John Hine, a wild, roving fellow, who never did any real harm in his life to any one but himself, hastening his own death by foolish excesses. Nevertheless, his ghost had been seen more than once, sitting on the cold clay mound beneath which the soul's expression was fading and crumbling into dust--so, at least, said some of the oldest and most pious inhabitants of our village. There, too, Mary Wildermings, a fair young girl who died, more sinned against than sinning, had been heard to sing sad lullabies under the waning moon sometimes, and at other times had been sitting by her sunken grave, and braiding roses, as for a bridal, in her hair. True, I never saw any of these wonderful things; but a spot more likely to be haunted by the unresting spirits of the bad could not readily be imagined. The woods, thick and full of birds, along the roadside, thinned away toward the desolate ridge, where briers grew over the grave-mounds, and about and through the fallen palings, as they would, with here and there a little clearing among weeds and thistles and high matted grass, for the making of a new bed. It was the twilight of a beautiful summer day as I walked down the grassy lane and past the lonesome graveyard to make my first call at the cottage, feeling, I scarcely knew why, strangely sad. By an old broken bridge in the hollow between the cottage and the graveyard I remember that I sat down, and for a long time listened to the trickling of the water over the pebbles, and watched the golden patches of sunlight till they quite faded out as "came still evening on, and twilight gray, that in her sober livery all things clad." So quietly I sat that the mole, beginning its blind work at sunset, loosened and stirred the ground beneath my feet, and the white, thick-winged moths, coming from beneath the dusty weeds, fluttered about me, and lighted in my lap, and the dull, flabby beating of the bat came almost in my face. The first complaint of the owl sounded along the hollow and died over the next hill, warning me to proceed, when I heard, as it were the echo of my own thought, repeated in a low, melancholy voice, the conclusion of that beautiful stanza of the elegy in reference to that moping bird. I distinctly caught the lines---- "Of such as wandering near her sacred bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign."