There stood the early settlers, those old illustrious ones,
the heroes of tradition and fireside legends, the men of history whose
features had been so long beneath the sod that few alive could have
remembered them. There, too, were faces of former townspeople, dimly
recollected from childhood, and others, whom Leonard and Alice had
wept in later years, but who now were most terrible of all, by their
ghastly smile of recognition. All, in short, were there; the dead of
other generations, whose moss-grown names could scarce be read upon
their tombstones, and their successors, whose graves were not yet
green; all whom black funerals had followed slowly thither now
reappeared where the mourners left them. Yet none but souls accursed
were there, and fiends counterfeiting the likeness of departed saints.
The countenances of those venerable men, whose very features had
been hallowed by lives of piety, were contorted now by intolerable
pain or hellish passion, and now by an unearthly and derisive
merriment. Had the pastors prayed, all saintlike as they seemed, it
had been blasphemy.
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