savage, by which the world was rid of scourges more awful
and more potent than the felon with his candid dagger? Fell instigators
of the evil in men's secret hearts, shaping into action the vague,
half-formed desire, and guiding with agencies impalpable, unseen, their
spell-bound instruments of calamity and death.

Such were the gloomy questions that I--by repute, the sternest advocate
of common-sense against fantastic errors; by profession, the searcher
into flesh and blood, and tissue and nerve and sinew, for the causes
of all that disease the mechanism of the universal human frame; I,
self-boasting physician, sceptic, philosopher, materialist--revolved,
not amidst gloomy pines, under grim winter skies, but as I paced slow
through laughing meadows, and by the banks of merry streams, in the
ripeness of the golden August: the hum of insects in the fragrant grass,
the flutter of birds amid the delicate green of boughs checkered by
playful sunbeams and gentle shadows, and ever in sight of the resorts of
busy workday man,--walls, roof-tops, church-spires rising high; there,
white and modern, the handwriting of our race, in this practical
nineteenth century, on its square plain masonry and Doric shafts, the
Town-Hall, central in the animated marketplace. And I--I--prying into
long-neglected corners and dust-holes of memory for what my reason had
flung there as worthless rubbish; reviving the jargon of French law, in
the proces verbal, against a Gille de Retz, or an Urbain Grandier, and
sifting the equity of sentences on witchcraft!

Bursting the links of this ghastly soliloquy with a laugh at my own
folly, I struck into a narrow path that led back towards the city, by
a quiet and rural suburb; the path wound on through a wide and solitary
churchyard, at the base of the Abbey-hill. Many of the former dwellers
on that eminence now slept in the lowly burial-ground at its foot; and
the place, mournfully decorated with the tombs which still jealously
mark distinctions of rank amidst the levelling democracy of the grave,
was kept trim with the care which comes half from piety, and half from
pride.

I seated myself on a bench, placed between the clipped yew-trees that
bordered the path from the entrance to the church porch, deeming vaguely
that my own perplexing thoughts might imbibe a quiet from the quiet of
the place.

"And oh," I murmured to myself, "oh that I had one bosom friend to
whom I might freely confide all these to