Leaning against the blank wall opposite my house were three silent figures. They were a little distance apart, and they leaned against their support with the composure of three cabinet ministers on their green benches on the night of a great debate. Their feet were slightly parted, and they gazed on the road with a solemn, placid expression, as of men to whom the Atlantean weight of this weary world was as the down on a feather. Calmly and judicially, as if seeing nothing, yet weighing all things, they looked on pebble and broken limestone, never raising their heads, never removing their hands from their pockets. They had been there since breakfast time that morning, and it was now past noon.
"My God," said Father Letheby, when I told him, "'t is awful!"
"'T is the sublime," I said.
"And do you mean to tell me that they have never stirred from that posture for two long hours?"
"You have my word for it," I replied; "and you know the opinion entertained about my veracity,—'he'd no more tell a lie than the parish priest.'"
"I notice it everywhere," he said, in his impetuous way. "If I drive along the roads, my mare's head is right over the car or butt, before the fellow wakes up to see me; and then the exasperating coolness and deliberation with which he draws the reins to pull aside. My boy, too, when waiting on the road for a few minutes whilst I am attending a patient, falls fast asleep, like the fat boy in Pickwick; down there, under the cliffs, the men sleep all day in, or under, their boats. Why does not Charcot send all his nervous patients to Ireland? The air is not only a sedative, but a soporific. 'T is the calm of the eternal gods,—the sleep of the immortals."
"'T is the sleep of Enceladus in Etna," I replied. "When they wake up and turn, 't is hot lava and ashes."
"That's true, too," he said, musingly; "we are a strange people."
My own voice again echoing out of the dead past.