to his eyes? But then the jailor, who
had heard him imploring--beseeching--commanding his father to remain,
till after the trial, at Moorside, said, that all the while the prisoner
sobbed and wept like a child; and that when he unlocked the door of the
cell, to let the old man out, it was a hard thing to tear away the arms
and hands of Ludovic from his knees, while the father sat like a stone
image on the bed, and kept his tearless eyes fixed sternly upon the
wall, as if not a soul had been present, and he himself had been a
criminal condemned next day to die.

The father had obeyed, _religiously_, that miserable injunction, and
from religion it seemed he had found comfort. For Sabbath after Sabbath
he was at the kirk--he stood, as he had been wont to do for years, at
the poor's plate, and returned grave salutations to those who dropt
their mite into the small sacred treasury--his eyes calmly, and even
critically, regarded the pastor during prayer and sermon--and his deep
bass voice was heard, as usual, through all the house of God, in the
Psalms. On week-days he was seen by passers-by to drive his flocks
afield, and to overlook his sheep on the hill-pastures, or in the
pen-fold; and as it was still spring, and seed-time had been late this
season, he was observed holding the plough, as of yore; nor had his
skill deserted him--for the furrows were as straight as if drawn by a
rule on paper--and soon bright and beautiful was the braird on all the
low lands of his farm. The Comforter was with him, and, sorely as he had
been tried, his heart was not yet wholly broken; and it was believed
that, for years, he might outlive the blow that at first had seemed more
than a mortal man might bear and be! Yet that his woe, though hidden,
was dismal, all ere long knew, from certain tokens that intrenched his
face--cheeks shrunk and fallen; brow not so much furrowed as scarred;
eyes quenched; hair thinner and thinner far, as if he himself had torn
it away in handfuls during the solitude of midnight--and now absolutely
as white as snow; and over the whole man an indescribable ancientness
far beyond his years--though they were many, and most of them had been
passed in torrid climes--all showed how grief has its agonies as
destructive as those of guilt, and those the most wasting when they work
in the heart and in the brain, unrelieved by the shedding of one single
tear--when the very soul turns dry as dust, and life is imprisoned,
rathe