We had been for some time walking over a rocky moorland covered with
dry plants and mosses, when I descried a little cottage in the farthest
distance. The sun was not yet down, but he was wrapt in a gray cloud.
The heath looked as if it had never been warm, and the wind blew
strangely cold, as if from some region where it was always night.

"Here we are at last!" said the raven. "What a long way it is! In half
the time I could have gone to Paradise and seen my cousin--him, you
remember, who never came back to Noah! Dear! dear! it is almost winter!"

"Winter!" I cried; "it seems but half a day since we left home!"

"That is because we have travelled so fast," answered the raven. "In
your world you cannot pull up the plumb-line you call gravitation, and
let the world spin round under your feet! But here is my wife's house!
She is very good to let me live with her, and call it the sexton's
cottage!"

"But where is your churchyard--your cemetery--where you make your
graves, I mean?" said I, seeing nothing but the flat heath.

The raven stretched his neck, held out his beak horizontally, turned it
slowly round to all the points of the compass, and said nothing.

I followed the beak with my eyes, and lo, without church or graves, all
was a churchyard! Wherever the dreary wind swept, there was the raven's
cemetery! He was sexton of all he surveyed! lord of all that was laid
aside! I stood in the burial-ground of the universe; its compass the
unenclosed heath, its wall the gray horizon, low and starless! I had
left spring and summer, autumn and sunshine behind me, and come to the
winter that waited for me! I had set out in the prime of my youth, and
here I was already!--But I mistook. The day might well be long in that
region, for it contained the seasons. Winter slept there, the night
through, in his winding-sheet of ice; with childlike smile, Spring came
awake in the dawn; at noon, Summer blazed abroad in her gorgeous beauty;
with the slow-changing afternoon, old Autumn crept in, and died at the
first breath of the vaporous, ghosty night.

As we drew near the cottage, the clouded sun was rushing down the
steepest slope of the west, and he sank while we were yet a few yards
from the door. The same instant I was assailed by a cold that seemed
almost a material presence, and I struggled across the threshold as if
from the clutches of an icy death. A wind swelled up on the moor, and
rushed at the door as with difficulty I c