er. We had but to stand still for five minutes or so, no easy matter
then, for we were more restless than a wave, or to lie down with our ear
to the ground, and the spirit was sure to move the old Quaker, who
forthwith began to preach and pray and sing Psalms. How he moaned at
times as if his heart were breaking! At times, as if some old forgotten
sorrow were recalled, how he sighed! Then recovering his
self-possession, as if to clear his voice, he gave a hem, and then a
short nasty cough like a patient in a consumption. Now all was hush, and
you might have supposed he had fallen asleep, for in that hush you heard
what seemed an intermitting snore. When all at once, whew, whew, whew,
as if he were whistling, accompanied with a strange rushing sound as of
diving wings. That was in the air--but instantly after you heard
something odder still in the bog. And while wondering, and of your
wonder finding no end, the ground, which a moment before had felt firm
as a road, began to shrink, and sink, and hesitate, and hurry, and
crumble, and mumble all around you, and close up to your very feet--the
quagmires gurgling as if choked--and a subterranean voice distinctly
articulating Oh! Oh! Oh!

We have heard of people who pretend not to believe in ghosts--geologists
who know how the world was created; but will they explain that moor? And
how happened it that only by nights and dark nights it was so haunted?
Beneath a wakeful moon and unwinking stars it was silent as a frozen
sea. You listened then, and heard but the grass growing, and beautiful
grass it was, though it was called coarse, and made the sweetest-scented
hay. What crowds of bum-bees' bikes--foggies--did the scythe not reveal
as it heaped up the heavy swathes--three hundred stone to the acre--by
guess,--for there was neither weighing nor measuring there then-a-days,
but all was in the lump--and there the rush-roped stacks stood all the
winter through, that they might be near the "eerie outlan' cattle," on
places where cart-wheel never circled, nor axle-tree creaked--nor ever
car of antique make trailed its low load along--for the horse would have
been laired. We knew not then at all--and now we but imperfectly
know--the cause of the Beautiful. Then we believed the Beautiful to be
wholly extern; something we had nothing to do with but to look at, and
lo! it shone divinely there! Happy creed if false--for in it, with
holiest reverence, we blamelessly adored the stars. There