The sexton looked up, and cried—"It is David. He has been out, and is covered with snow. He comes in good time."
It was even so. The man approached, and the implements having been procured, they set about opening the grave. Mr. B—— stood motionless, his head hanging down, and deep sighs occasionally coming from his breast, mixed with the quick breathing of the men, as they plied their shovels. He still held the lantern in his hand, by the light of which the group before me is brought out in faint relief. The silence around was signally that of a churchyard; for the fir belt shrouded the scene from the night breeze, and there was only occasionally heard a low, mournful gust, as it died among the branches of the trees. On that spot only there was quick breathing action. The men had got down pretty far into the grave; and, as they brought their heads within the ray of the lantern, in their acts of throwing up the earth, their flushed faces contrasted strongly with the cadaverous countenance of the husband, who leant over them, watching every motion, and intent upon the expected stroke of the shovel upon the coffin lid. The recollection of the attributes of the German ghoul came over me; nor did the difference between the beings, the motives, and the actions, prevent me from conjuring up the similitude, so unlike a human being did he appear in his complexion, his fixed, dead-like stare into the grave, and the perfect stillness of his body, as he crouched down to be nearer to the object of his search. At length, the sound was heard, the rattle on the coffin lid. The victim's ear seemed chained to the sound, as if he could have augured from it whether or not the chest was empty. In a short time,
"The heavy moil that shrouds the dead"
was entirely removed. The sexton now took his own lamp down into the grave. The screw-nails were undone, the lid was raised, and the body of Mrs B——, arrayed in her winding-sheet and scalloped sere-clothes, was seen, by the sickly, yellow gleam of the lantern, lying in the stillness and placidity of death—
"For still, still she lay,
With a wreath on her bosom."
One of the men now came out, and Mr B—— descended into the grave. He lifted off the face-cloth, gazed on the clay-cold face, touched it, and now was opened the
"Sacred source of sympathetic tears."
He burst into a loud paroxysm; and, as if nature had been to take her revenge for her sufferings, under the freezing influence of his sorrow, he wept as if there had been to be no end of his weeping. It was latterly found necessary to force him out of the grave; though, as I was informed by George, he had shrunk from the view of the dead body of his wife, while it lay in the house, and before it was interred. The lid was again placed on the coffin, the screws fixed, and the grave filled up. Mr B—— slipped a guinea into the hand of the sexton, and we took our way back to the town. George informed us, as we went, that he had been for several nights haunted by the image of his mother; and could only thus account for the conviction that had seized him, that the body of the female he had seen in the dissecting-room was that of his parent. It is a remarkable fact, and the one which chiefly induced me to give this narrative, that the scene I have now described wrought so powerfully on the feelings of Mr B——, that the form of his grief was entirely changed. During the whole of the subsequent night, he wept intensely—nature was relieved—his sorrow was mollified into one of those
"Moods that speak their softened woes;"
and time soon wrought its accustomed amelioration. I never saw one who seemed more certainly doomed to the fate of the heart-stricken; and, however fanciful it may seem, I attribute to the mistake of his son the restoration of the father.