Twenty years have elapsed. Dr. Benson wakes. It is a clear morning. How has the world changed! There, out of his window he sees the village. That row of neat dwellings is his property. He has a pleasant home to wake in. His wife is the very personification of happiness and prosperity. The clothes in which he arrays himself are a strange contrast to the miserable habiliments in which he fell down to sleep on the office floor twenty years ago. There is the spire of the church—and thank God, he loves to enter there as a sincere and humble worshipper.
What a change in this lapse of years! What an awakening! How is the world altered!
If the doctor's voice reached the ear of the intemperate man, he said, "Friend, better the fang of the rattlesnake than your cup. The bands that you think to be threads, are iron bands that are clasping you not only for your grave, but forever. Awake! and see if the good Lord will not give you a world changed, as the world has thus been to Dr. Benson."
II.
THE GHOST AT FORD INN—NESHAMONY.
PART FIRST.
There, where the time-worn bridge at School House Run,
Spans o'er the stream unquiet as our lives,
You find a place where few will pause at night;
Where the foot-fall is quick, and all press on
As if a winter's blast had touched the frame,
And men drew to themselves. Oft there is seen,
So men aver, the quiet gliding ghost.
Descend yon hill, near woods so desolate,
With upward gloom, and tangled undergrowths,
And shadows mouldering in the brightest day.
Near is the Indian spring's unmurmuring flow.
The summit now is gladdened by the Church.
You leave all village sounds, and are alone,
On grass-worn paths your feet emit no sound.
The thick damp air is full of dreary rest,
And stillness there spreads out like the great night.