stagnated within me for some quarter of an
hour.

These barbarous stories carried me, sitting
there on the Holly-Tree hearth, to the Roadside
Inn, renowned in my time in a sixpenny
book with a folding plate, representing in a
central compartment of oval form the portrait
of Jonathan Bradford, and in four corner
compartments four incidents of the tragedy with
which the name is associated—coloured with
a hand at once so free and economical, that
the bloom of Jonathan's complexion passed
without any pause into the breeches of the
ostler, and, smearing itself off into the next
division, became rum in a bottle. Then, I
remembered how the landlord was found at
the murdered traveller's bedside, with his own
knife at his feet, and blood upon his hand;
how he was hanged for the murder, notwith-
standing his protestation, that he had indeed
come there to kill the traveller for his saddlebags,
but had been stricken motionless on
finding him already slain; and how the ostler,
years afterwards, owned the deed. By this
time I had made myself quite uncomfortable.
I stirred the fire, and stood with my back to
it, as long as I could bear the heat, looking up
at the darkness beyond the screen, and at the
wormy curtains creeping in and creeping out,
like the worms in the ballad of Alonzo the
Brave and the fair Imogene.

There was an Inn in the cathedral town
where I went to school, which had pleasanter
recollections about it than any of these. I
took it next. It was the Inn where friends
used to put up, and where we used to go to
see parents, and to have salmon and fowls,
and be tipped. It had an ecclesiastical sign
—the Mitre—and a bar that seemed to be
the next best thing to a bishopric, it was so
snug. I loved the landlord's youngest
daughter to distraction—but let that pass.
It was in this Inn that I was cried over by
my rosy little sister, because I had acquired
a black eye in a fight. And though she
had been, that Holly-Tree night, for many
a long year where all tears are dried, the
Mitre softened me yet.

"To be continued, to-morrow," said I, when
I took my candle to go to bed. But, my bed
took it upon itself to continue the train of
thought that night. It carried me away, like
the enchanted carpet, to a distant place
(though still in England), and there, alighting
from a stage-coach at another Inn in the
snow, as I had actually done some years
before, I repeated in my sleep, a curious
experience I had really had there. More than
a year before I made the journey in the course
of which I put up at that Inn, I had lost a
very near and dear friend by death. Every
night since, at home or away from home, I
had dreamed of that friend; sometimes, as
still living; sometimes, as returning from
the world of shadows to comfort me; always
as being beautiful, placid, and happy; never
in association with any approach to fear or
distress. It was at a lonely Inn in a wide
moorland place, that I halted to pass the
night. When I had looked from my
bedroom window over the waste of snow on
which the moon was shining, I sat down
by my fire, to write a letter. I had always,
until that hour, kept it within my own
breast that I dreamed every night of the
dear lost one. But, in the letter that I
wrote, I recorded the circumstance, and
added that I felt much interested in proving
whether the subject of my dream would still
be faithful to me, travel-tired, and in that
remote place. No. I lost the beloved figure
of my vision in parting with the secret. My
sleep has never looked upon it since, in sixteen
years, but once. I was in Italy, and
awoke (or seemed to awake), the well-remembered
voice distinctly in my ears, conversing
with it. I entreated it, as it rose above my
bed and soared up to the vaulted roof of the
old room, to answer me a question I had asked,
touchiug the Future Life. My hands were still
outstretched towards it as it vanished, when
I heard a bell ringing by the garden wall,
and a voice, in the deep stillness of the night,
caling on all good Christians to pray for the
souls of the dead; it being All Souls Eve.

To return to the Holly-Tree. When I
awoke next day, it was freezing hard, and the
lowering sky threatened more snow. My
breakfast cleared away, I drew my chair into
its former place, and, with the fire getting so
much the better of the landscape that I sat
in twilight, resumed my Inn remembrances.

That was a good Inn down in Wiltshire
where I put up once, in the days of the hard
Wiltshire ale, and before all beer was bitterness.
It was on the skirts of Salisbury Plain,
and the midnight wind that rattled my
lattice window, came moaning at me from
Stonehenge. There was a hanger-on at that
establishment (a supernaturally-preserved
Druid, I believe him to have been, and to be
still), with long white hair, and a flinty blue
eye always looking afar off: who claimed to
have been a shepherd, and who seemed to be
ever watching for the re-appearance on the
verge of the horizon, of some ghostly flock of
sheep that had been mutton for many ages.
He was a man with a weird belief in him
that no one could count the stones of Stonehenge
twice, and make the same number of
them; likewise, that any one who counted
them three times nine times, and then stood
in the centre and said " I dare! " would
behold a tremendous apparition, and be stricken
dead. He pretended to have seen a bustard
(I suspect him to have been familiar with
the dodo), in manner following: He was
out upon the plain at the close of a late
autumn day, when he dimly discerned, going
on before him at a curious fitfully bounding
pace, what he at first supposed to be a gig-
umbrella that had been blown from some
conveyance, but what he presently believed
to be a lean dwarf man upon a little pony.