th the growths of primeval
wildernesses, and rugged with the tilted strata of great upheavals, and
with chasms cut in the solid rock by centuries of erosion, traces
of some remote cataclysmal period, registering thus its throes and
turmoils. The blue sky, seen beyond a gaunt profile of one of the
farther summits that defined its craggy serrated edge against the
ultimate distances of the western heavens, seemed of a singularly suave
tint, incongruous with the savagery of the scene, which clouds and
portents of storm might better have befitted. The little graveyard,
which John Dundas discerned with recognizing eyes, albeit they had never
before rested upon it, was revealed suddenly, lying high on the opposite
side of the gorge. No frost glimmered now on the lowly mounds; the
flickering autumnal sunshine loitered unafraid among them, according
to its languid wont for many a year. Shadows of the gray un-painted
head-boards lay on the withered grass, brown and crisp, with never
a cicada left to break the deathlike silence. A tuft of red leaves,
vagrant in the wind, had been caught on one of the primitive monuments,
and swayed there with a decorative effect. The enclosure seemed, to
unaccustomed eyes, of small compass, and few the denizens who had found
shelter here and a resting-place, but it numbered all the dead of the
country-side for many a mile and many a year, and somehow the loneliness
was assuaged to a degree by the reflection that they had known each
other in life, unlike the great herds of cities, and that it was a
common fate which the neighbors, huddled together, encountered in
company.

It had no discordant effect in the pervasive sense of gloom, of mighty
antagonistic forces with which the scene was replete; it fostered a
realization of the pitiable minuteness and helplessness of human nature
in the midst of the vastness of inanimate nature and the evidences of
infinite lengths of forgotten time, of the long reaches of unimagined
history, eventful, fateful, which the landscape at once suggested and
revealed and concealed.

Like the sudden flippant clatter of castanets in the pause of some
solemn funeral music was the impression given by the first glimpse along
the winding woodland way of a great flimsy white building, with its
many pillars, its piazzas, its "observatory," its band-stand, its garish
intimations of the giddy, gay world of a summer hotel. But, alack! it,
too, had its surfeit of woe.

"The guer