and level
ground, I saw the convent before me.

It was a dark, low, sinister-looking place. Not a sign of life or
movement was visible anywhere about it. Green stains streaked the once
white facade of the chapel in all directions. Moss clustered thick in
every crevice of the heavy scowling wall that surrounded the convent.
Long lank weeds grew out of the fissures of roof and parapet, and,
drooping far downward, waved wearily in and out of the barred dormitory
windows. The very cross opposite the entrance-gate, with a shocking
life-sized figure in wood nailed to it, was so beset at the base with
crawling creatures, and looked so slimy, green, and rotten all the way
up, that I absolutely shrank from it.

A bell-rope with a broken handle hung by the gate. I approached
it--hesitated, I hardly knew why--looked up at the convent again, and
then walked round to the back of the building, partly to gain time
to consider what I had better do next, partly from an unaccountable
curiosity that urged me, strangely to myself, to see all I could of the
outside of the place before I attempted to gain admission at the gate.

At the back of the convent I found an outhouse, built on to the wall--a
clumsy, decayed building, with the greater part of the roof fallen in,
and with a jagged hole in one of its sides, where in all probability a
window had once been. Behind the outhouse the trees grew thicker than
ever. As I looked toward them I could not determine whether the ground
beyond me rose or fell--whether it was grassy, or earthy, or rocky. I
could see nothing but the all-pervading leaves, brambles, ferns, and
long grass.

Not a sound broke the oppressive stillness. No bird's note rose from the
leafy wilderness around me; no voices spoke in the convent garden behind
the scowling wall; no clock struck in the chapel-tower; no dog barked in
the ruined outhouse. The dead silence deepened the solitude of the place
inexpressibly. I began to feel it weighing on my spirits--the more,
because woods were never favorite places with me to walk in. The sort of
pastoral happiness which poets often represent when they sing of life in
the woods never, to my mind, has half the charm of life on the mountain
or in the plain. When I am in a wood, I miss the boundless loveliness of
the sky, and the delicious softness that distance gives to the earthly
view beneath. I feel oppressively the change which the free air suffers
when it gets imprisoned among le