“I agree with you there. Their religious feelings must be left untouched, or all is over; but I am sorry that this particular observance is implicated with them so completely as you say. It will be well if it does not soon become an impossibility to toll the bell for all who die.”
“It would be well, too,” said Dr Levitt, “if this were the only superstition the people entertained. They are more terrified with some others than with this bell. I am afraid they are more depressed by their superstitions than sustained by their religion. Have you observed, Hope, how many of them stand looking at the sky every night?”
“Yes; and we hear, wherever we go, of fiery swords, and dreadful angels, seen in the clouds; and the old prophecies have all come up again—at least, all of them that are dismal. As for the death-watches, they are out of number; and there is never a fire lighted but a coffin flies out.”
“And this story of a ghost of a coffin, with four ghosts to bear it, that goes up and down in the village all night long,” said Hester, “I really do not wonder that it shakes the nerves of the sick to hear of it. They say that no one can stop those bearers, or get any answer from them: but on they glide, let what will be in their way.”
“Come, tell me,” said Dr Levitt, “have not you yourself looked out for that sight?”
Hester acknowledged that she had seen a real substantial coffin, carried by human bearers, pass down the middle of the street, at an hour past midnight; the removal of a body from a house where it had died, she supposed, to another whence it was to be buried. This coffin and the ghostly one she took to be one and the same.
Dr Levitt mentioned instances of superstition, which could scarcely have been believed by him, if related by another.
“Do you know the Platts?” he inquired of Hope. “Have you seen the poor woman that lies ill there with her child?”
“Yes: what a state of destitution they are in!”
“At the very time that that woman and her child are lying on shavings, begged from the carpenter’s yard, her mother finds means to fee the fortune-teller in the lane for reading a dream. The fortune-teller dooms the child, and speaks doubtfully of the mother.”