no reason
to doubt it, except it be the tinge of absurdity in the fact. But, in
this apparently prosperous state of things, her own convictions began to
falter. A doubt stole into her mind whether she might not have mistaken
the depository and mode of concealment of those historic treasures; and
after once admitting the doubt, she was afraid to hazard the shock of
uplifting the stone and finding nothing. She examined the surface of the
gravestone, and endeavored, without stirring it, to estimate whether it
were of such thickness as to be capable of containing the archives of
the Elizabethan club. She went over anew the proofs, the clues, the
enigmas, the pregnant sentences, which she had discovered in Bacon's
letters and elsewhere, and now was frightened to perceive that they
did not point so definitely to Shakspeare's tomb as she had heretofore
supposed. There was an unmistakably distinct reference to a tomb, but it
might be Bacon's, or Raleigh's, or Spenser's; and instead of the "Old
Player," as she profanely called him, it might be either of those
three illustrious dead, poet, warrior, or statesman, whose ashes, in
Westminster Abbey, or the Tower burial-ground, or wherever they sleep,
it was her mission to disturb.

But she continued to hover around the church, and seems to have had full
freedom of entrance in the daytime, and special license, on one
occasion at least, at a late hour of the night. She went thither with
a dark-lantern, which could but twinkle like a glow-worm through the
volume of obscurity that filled the great dusky edifice. Groping her way
up the aisle and towards the chancel, she sat down on the elevated part
of the pavement above Shakspeare's grave. If the divine poet really
wrote the inscription there, and cared as much about the quiet of his
bones as its deprecatory earnestness would imply, it was time for those
crumbling relics to bestir themselves under her sacrilegious feet. But
they were safe. She made no attempt to disturb them; though, I believe,
she looked narrowly into the crevices between Shakspeare's and the two
adjacent stones, and in some way satisfied herself that her single
strength would suffice to lift the former, in case of need. She threw
the feeble ray of her lantern up towards the bust, but could not make it
visible beneath the darkness of the vaulted roof. Had she been subject
to superstitious terrors, it is impossible to conceive of a situation
that could better entitle he