their place and add a few lines to the story of the
Colonel's new house.

It is an old house now, old and desolate. As Lemuel said--he is one of
our first men--it is accursed and no one has ever felt brave enough or
reckless enough to care to cross again its ghostly threshold. Though I
never heard any one say it is haunted, there are haunting memories
enough surrounding it for one to feel a ghastly recoil from invading
precincts defiled by such a crime. So the kindly forest has taken it
into its protection, and Nature, who ever acts the generous part, has
tried to throw the mantle of her foliage over the decaying roof, and
about the lonesome walls, accepting what man forsakes and so
fulfilling her motherhood.

I am still a resident in the town, and I have a family now that has
outgrown the little cottage which the apple-tree once guarded. But it
is not to tell of them or of myself that I have taken these pages from
their safe retreat to-day, but to speak of the sight which I saw this
morning when I passed through the churchyard, as I often do, to pluck
a rose from the bush which we lads planted on Juliet's grave twenty
years ago. They always seem sweeter to me than other roses, and I take
a superstitious delight in them, in which my wife, strange to say,
does not participate. But that is neither here nor there.

The sight which I thought worth recording was this: I had come slowly
through the yard, for the sunshine was brilliant and the month June,
and sad as the spot is, it is strangely beautiful to one who loves
nature, when as I approached the corner where Juliet lies, and which
you will remember was in the very spot where I once heard her take her
reluctant oath, I saw crouched against her tomb a figure which seemed
both strange and vaguely familiar to me. Not being able to guess who
it was, as there is now nobody in town who remembers her with any more
devotion than myself, I advanced with sudden briskness, when the
person I was gazing upon rose, and turning towards me, looked with
deeply searching and most certainly very wretched eyes into mine. I
felt a shock, first of surprise, and then of wildest recollection. The
man before me was the Colonel, and the grief apparent in his face and
disordered mien showed that years of absence had not done their work,
and that he had never forgotten the arch and brilliant Juliet.

Bowing humbly and with a most reverent obeisance, for he was still the
great man of the county