The large faded shawl pinned across her shoulders nearly covered the red flannel petticoat, and the orange-and-black spotted muslin was wrapped into a turban on her head. Without breathing, almost without feeling, I watched the figure until at the corner it turned out of sight, and a long dark outline on the grass behind it ran into the fence. The shadow! Then it was not a ghost. Had the grave given up its dead? I would see.
At the church-yard the briers tore my face and clothes, but I plunged deeper where the shade thickened under the thorn-trees. There in the corner I stooped to lift the broken slab of a tomb, but all my strength would not avail to move it. As I leaned over, bruising my hands in a vain endeavor to raise it, my eyes fell for an instant on the stone, and with a start I turned quickly and ran to the church; then I stopped—the narrow fissure that cut zigzag across the slab on the tomb was filled with green moss, and this window was nailed up, and hung full of heavy cobwebs.
And my instrument?
Suddenly, while I stood there, some substance in my brain seemed to break up—it was the fetters of monomania which had bound me since that evening long ago, when, by the river in the oak-forest, I had heard the robin trill.
No murder stained my soul: and there, beside the black waves of insanity through which I had passed unharmed, I gave praise to the great Creator—praise silent, but intense as Miriam’s song by the sea.
THE PATHS OF THE SEA.
Around the porch there hung that day a crimson glory. It was the climbing rose about the door displaying its gorgeous bloom in a thousand crowns. Green, grass-green were the hills, but in front of the house the cliff fell abruptly, with a precipitous drop, to the sea. On either side the waving coast-line stretched away, a shining belt of yellow sand. There the breakers with unfurled banners of fleece followed each other in a never ending procession to the shore. But at the foot the billows, by day and night running in forever, dashed against the rock and chopped to a seething foam that threw up in one continual briny shower its white and glittering spray.