glass under my feet, and stooping down I picked up a
richly-stained fragment: it bore a portion of that much-revered sign,
the pelican giving her young to eat of her own flesh and blood--the
sign which Puseyism and Popery equally agree in regarding as
adequately expressive of their doctrine of the real presence, and
which our Scottish Episcopalians have so recently adopted as the
characteristic vignette of their service-book. The toad and the newt
had crept over it, and it had borrowed a new tint of brilliancy from
the slime of the snail. Destruction had run riot along the walls of
this parish church. There were carvings chipped and mutilated, as if
in sport, less apparently with the intention of defacing, than
rendering them contemptible and grotesque. A huge cross of stone had
been reared over the altar, and both the top and one of the arms had
been struck away, and from the surviving arm there dangled a noose.
The cross had been transformed into a gibbet. Nor were there darker
indications wanting. In a recess set apart as a cabinet for relics,
there were human bones all too fresh to belong to a remote antiquity;
and in a niche under the gibbet lay the tattered remains of a surplice
dabbled in blood. I stood amid the ruins, and felt a sense of fear and
horror creeping over me: the air darkened under the scowl of the
coming tempest and the closing night, and the wind shrieked more
mournfully amid the shattered and dismantled walls.

There came another change over my dream. I found myself wandering in
darkness, I knew not whither, among bushes and broken ground; there
was the roar of a large stream in my ear, and the savage howl of the
storm. I retain a confused, imperfect recollection of a light
streaming upon broken water--of a hard struggle in a deep ford--and of
at length sharing in the repose and safety of a cottage, solitary and
humble almost as my own. The vision again strengthened, and I found
myself seated beside a fire, and engaged with a few grave and serious
men in singing the evening psalm, with which they closed for the time
their services of social devotion.

'The period of trial wears fast away,' said one of the number, when
all was over--a grey-haired, patriarchal-looking old man--'The period
of trial is well-nigh over, the storms of our long winter are past,
and we have survived them all. Patience! a little more patience, and
we shall see the glorious spring-time of the world begin! The vial is
at le