s
semicircular choir next the street, and, adjoining the choir, a spire of
more modern brickwork built up to an open bell cupola, and open ribbed
dome, also of brick, tipped with a gilded cross, the ivy was greenly
matted all round the choir, and ran along the side of the church, where
Levin Dennis walked under four tall, round-topped windows of stained and
wired glass, till he came to the end gable or front of the church,
standing in unworldly contemplation of the graveyard and the back
fields.

There, since the Stamp Act Congress, or when Princess Anne was not half
a century old, the old church had taken its stand, backed up to the
town, recluse from its gossip. Between its tall round doors, with little
window-panes like spectacles let into their panels, the ivy vine arose
in form like the print of The Crucified, reaching out its stems and
tendrils wide of the one glorified window in the gable, in whose red
dyes glimmered the triumph of a bloody countenance. The mossy walls,
often scraped, the mossified pavement, the greenish tombs of marble
under the maples and firs, showed the effect of shade, solitude, and
humidity upon all things of brick in this climate, where wood was
already rising into favor as building material, but to the detraction of
picturesqueness and all the appearance of antiquity.

No sign of the unpopular townsman was to be seen anywhere, but, as Levin
Dennis peeked around the foliage in the yard he beheld a man he had
never observed before, and of a tall, bearded, suspicious, and ruffianly
exterior, lying flat on the top of a memorial vault, with his head and
feet half concealed in some cedar brambles.

"Hallo!" Dennis shouted.

"What do you hallo for?" spoke the man; "don't you never come to a
churchyard to git yer sins forgive?"

"No," said the terrapin-finder, "not till I knows I has some sins."

"What air you prowlin' about the church then fur, anyhow?" demanded the
stranger, standing up in his boots, into which his trousers were tucked;
and he stood such a straight, long-limbed, lithe giant of a man that
Levin saw he could never run away, even if the intruder meant to chew
him up right there.

"I ain't a prowlin', friend," answered Levin Dennis. "I was jess a
lookin'."

"Lookin' fur what, fur which, fur who?" said the man, taking a step
towards Dennis, who felt himself to be no bigger than one of the other's
long, ditch-leaping, good-for-wading legs.

"Why, I was jess a follerin' a