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The old names can still be read in that region, both in the churchyards and upon the door plates, and the village of Pelham recalls the name of the Pell family who fled from Rochelle about the same time, and obtained a grant of six thousand acres of land near by. The newcomers were warmly welcomed, as their friends and relations were in England.
It was more carefully kept than most Scottish churchyards, and yet was not too trim. Nature had a word in the affair was allowed her part of mourning, in long grass and moss and the crumbling away of stone.
"He is very fond of solitude, of wandering about in churchyards and other lonely places. He was once found hiding in an empty tomb, which had been left open. His aversion to certain colors is remarkable. Generally speaking, he prefers bright tints to darker ones, but his likes and dislikes are capricious, and with regard to some colors his antipathy amounts to positive horror.
As you go down the social scale, you reach a point at length where the common talk in sick rooms is of churchyards and sepulchres, and a kind of perpetual vivisection is forever carried on, upon the person of the miserable sufferer. And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer the one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body.
The air was keen, and over the silence of the house-tops chimed the church-clocks Two. "It is late, and cold," said she, drawing her cloak more closely round her. "Not later than you usually sit up," I replied. "Don't go yet. 'Tis now the very witching hour of night, when churchyards yawn " "I beg your pardon," she interrupted.
When a man's mood becomes really serious he has little taste for such foolery. The man who has a grave or two in his heart, does not need to haunt churchyards. The young poet uses death as an antithesis; and when he shocks his reader by some flippant use of it in that way, he considers he has written something mightily fine.
The dark vestries and registries into which I have peeped, and the little hemmed-in churchyards that have echoed to my feet, have left impressions on my memory as distinct and quaint as any it has in that way received. In all those dusty registers that the worms are eating, there is not a line but made some hearts leap, or some tears flow, in their day.
Here is a piece of wild and ghostly poetry that is well worth digging out of the Duke of Newcastle's Humorous Lovers: At curfew-time, and at the dead of night, I will appear, thy conscious soul to fright, Make signs, and beckon thee my ghost to follow To sadder groves, and churchyards, where we'll hollo To darker caves and solitary woods, To fatal whirlpools and consuming floods; I'll tempt thee to pass by the unlucky ewe, Blasted with cursèd droppings of mildew; Under an oak, that ne'er bore leaf, my moans Shall there be told thee by the mandrake's groans; The winds shall sighing tell thy cruelty, And how thy want of love did murder me; And when the cock shall crow, and day grow near, Then in a flash of fire I'll disappear.
On the coins of later generations as well as on the altars of prehistoric times we find the "sacred" symbol of the cross. The dead in ancient cemeteries slept under the cross as they do in our day in Catholic churchyards. In ancient Egypt, as in modern China, India, Corea, the cross is venerated by the masses as a charm of great power.
Then there are the more supernatural superstitions, as of witches, ghosts, the devil, of Trolds, of mermen and mermaids, of Nissen, like your English pixey, of the three-legged horse that inhabits the churchyards, the were-wolf, the gnome that inhabits the elder tree, the nightmare, or, as we call it, Maren.
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