Roland Yorke / A Sequel to "The Channings"

Transcriber's Notes: 1. Page scan source: Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=U3gpAQAAIAAJ (Library of the University of California)
Shot in the Leg.
And Deering's Woods are fresh and fair,
And with joy that is almost pain
My heart goes back to wander there, And among the dreams of the days that were
I find my lost youth again. And the strange and beautiful song, The groves are repeating it still: 'A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'
Longfellow.
The scene of this Prologue to the story about to be written was a certain cathedral town, of which most of you have heard before, and the time close upon midnight.
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.