It was into this little village that I jogged with a quiet pace one warm afternoon, and began to look around for an inn. It was the heat of summer, and for no less than forty good English miles had myself and horse stumped it since morning, and over as dusty a road withall as one would like to travel on; and my horse seeming to feel his necessities as well as myself began to move a little faster, and by a sort of instinct, point his ears straight towards a large sign board swinging directly over the road, on which was a rampant lion large as life his fiery tongue lolling part way from his mouth, and a sort of dare-devil threat in his eye that he was about to leap down on the passengers. This however was yet a good half a mile off; and as I passed along, the village church-yard lay upon the left. I had come nearly to the end of this, when a light form sprang over the wall, and running up to me seized my horse by the bridle, while it said-- “O, sir, do come--they’ve left him all alone there, and I’ve called to him and sung to him, and he wont hear me--do come, sir, won’t you?”--and it pulled gently by the bit as it spake, and my horse stopped. I was thunder-struck. The creature before me was a faded girl, and as I should think in the last stages of the consumption. She must have been exceedingly beautiful once, for her form was still symmetry itself, and her features were as regular as if shaped with a chisel. Her face however was very pale. The blue veins were traceable on a forehead of silver by the ridges they made, though almost as white as the skin about them. Her eye-brows were regular as if struck out with a compass, and beneath them her eyes large, dark, and full, flashed as bright and as wild as stars in a wintry night. Her lip was as thin as paper. Her dress lay loose and low, and surely no lovelier neck and bosom (though they were shrunken) ever came into a poet’s vision, than that which rose and sank there painfully rapid as she stood waiting my answer. The hand which still lay on my bridle-bit was so thin and attenuated, that actually the sun shone through it almost as easily as if it were a piece of glass; and her small feet and ankles which were without covering, gave equal evidence of sorrow and abandonment. The only thing about her which still retained all its former beauty, was her hair, long, dark, and silky--that ornament of woman which death cannot destroy--which she still possessed, and in thick masses of luxuriant brown it hung about her with all the grace of a Madonna.