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She was overwhelmed by the space and silence, the color and form; and as she came close to Wharton's four great figures of the evangelists and saw how coarsely they were painted, and looked sheer down from them upon the distant church-floor, she thought herself in an older world, and would hardly have felt surprised at finding herself turned into an Italian peasant-girl, and at seeing Michael Angelo and Raphael, instead of Wharton and Esther, walk in at the side door, and proceed to paint her in celestial grandeur and beauty, as the new Madonna of the prairie, over the high altar.

Again and again in troubled dreams she had recalled that dreadful scene in the church with Brian; and she had seen the worms crawling out through the mouldering timbers of the church-floor she had smelt the sickening taint of corruption. She stood in the portico in the early summer morning, watching Mr.

His eye, as I have often said, was a black eye: it had now a tawny, nay, a bloody light in its gloom; and his face flushed olive cheek and hueless forehead received a glow as from spreading, ascending heart-fire: and he stirred, lifted his strong arm he could have struck Mason, dashed him on the church-floor, shocked by ruthless blow the breath from his body but Mason shrank away, and cried faintly, "Good God!"

Two tall, once considered elegant, stoves were nearly midway up the cracking church-floor; and Mary, the free woman, had made a fire in one of them, and the pine wood was roaring, and the long height of pipe was smoking. Startled by the fire, a venerable opossum came out of one of the pews, and waggled down the aisle, like a gray devotee who had said his prayers, and feared no man.

Then was Grettir led to the church, and when he came thither, many of those who were there before gazed at him and said one to the other, that he was little like to most folk, because of his strength and greatness of growth. Now, as Grettir went up the church-floor, there started up a lad of ripe growth, wondrous wild of look, and he said to Grettir