t silence,
indeed ashamed to express hopes which might prove fallacious; and the
agent or man of business, who alone knew exactly how matters stood,
maintained a countenance of mysterious importance, as if determined to
preserve the full interest of anxiety and suspense.

At length they arrived at the churchyard gates, and from thence, amid the
gaping of two or three dozen of idle women with infants in their arms,
and accompanied by some twenty children, who ran gambolling and screaming
alongside of the sable procession, they finally arrived at the
burial-place of the Singleside family. This was a square enclosure in the
Greyfriars churchyard, guarded on one side by a veteran angel without a
nose, and having only one wing, who had the merit of having maintained
his post for a century, while his comrade cherub, who had stood sentinel
on the corresponding pedestal, lay a broken trunk among the hemlock,
burdock, and nettles which grew in gigantic luxuriance around the walls
of the mausoleum. A moss-grown and broken inscription informed the reader
that in the year 1650 Captain Andrew Bertram, first of Singleside,
descended of the very ancient and honourable house of Ellangowan, had
caused this monument to be erected for himself and his descendants. A
reasonable number of scythes and hour-glasses, and death's heads and
cross-bones, garnished the following sprig of sepulchral poetry to the
memory of the founder of the mausoleum:--

Nathaniel's heart, Bezaleel's hand If ever any had, These boldly do I say
had he, Who lieth in this bed.

Here, then, amid the deep black fat loam into which her ancestors were
now resolved, they deposited the body of Mrs. Margaret Bertram; and, like
soldiers returning from a military funeral, the nearest relations who
might be interested in the settlements of the lady urged the dog-cattle
of the hackney coaches to all the speed of which they were capable, in
order to put an end to farther suspense on that interesting topic.

CHAPTER IX
Die and endow a college or a cat.

POPE.

There is a fable told by Lucian, that while a troop of monkeys, well
drilled by an intelligent manager, were performing a tragedy with great
applause, the decorum of the whole scene was at once destroyed, and the
natural passions of the actors called forth into very indecent and active
emulation, by a wag who threw a handful of nuts upon the stage. In like
manner, the approaching crisis stir