Mrs. Lawson towered indignantly at her side, joining in wrathful denunciations of the tyrant man; and fair, persecuted Dr. Simcoe's assenting voice was faintly heard amid the fiendish shrieks of those pestiferous younglings, Simcoe's children.
We knew by their ireful aspects some dreadful peril had menaced the cause of Woman's Rights, and while we gazed, their clamor increased to furious yells of rage and defiance, and a dark, descending cloud hung threateningly over their wrathful heads as they passed along.
On their vanishing shadows Mr. Pimble clappered his heelless slippers, with the long skirts of his palm-figured wrapper streaming on the air behind him; like the grim ghost of manhood pursuing its flying aggressors.
Then Florence, like a beam of light, danced past on the arm of Edgar, and a merry, laughing group followed quickly in their rear, among which we recognized the tall, portly form of Major Howard, smiling benignly on the happy faces around him.
But we looked in vain for the thin, bowed figure of his grief-stricken sister. There were two willow-shaded graves in the grass-grown church-yard, and o'er them bent the spectre-like form of the Hermit of the Cedars, his gray locks moistened by the falling night-dews, and his pale face turned upward to the midnight stars with an expression of mournful resignation.
As the clock in the ivy-hung steeple tower rang forth its echoing chimes on the odorous air, we cast one glance toward the swiftly-vanishing groups, and silently turned away.
Cold and bitter on our long-wrapped senses strike the harsh, blunt-edged realities of every-day existence. The multiplied images which but yesterday peopled our brain and thronged on our notice, have "departed thence, to return no more."
The last sound of their multitudinous voices has died in the distance, and Wimbledon is to us as if it had never been.