As to the assertion that the flat stone near the door was not the
grave of the miser who had disowned his only child and left a sum
of money to the church to buy a peal of bells, the bachelor did
readily admit the same, and that the place had given birth to no
such man. In a word, he would have had every stone, and plate of
brass, the monument only of deeds whose memory should survive. All
others he was willing to forget. They might be buried in
consecrated ground, but he would have had them buried deep, and
never brought to light again.
It was from the lips of such a tutor, that the child learnt her
easy task. Already impressed, beyond all telling, by the silent
building and the peaceful beauty of the spot in which it stood--
majestic age surrounded by perpetual youth--it seemed to her, when
she heard these things, sacred to all goodness and virtue. It was
another world, where sin and sorrow never came; a tranquil place of
rest, where nothing evil entered.
When the bachelor had given her in connection with almost every
tomb and flat grave-stone some history of its own, he took her down
into the old crypt, now a mere dull vault, and showed her how it
had been lighted up in the time of the monks, and how, amid lamps
depending from the roof, and swinging censers exhaling scented
odours, and habits glittering with gold and silver, and pictures,
and precious stuffs, and jewels all flashing and glistening through
the low arches, the chaunt of aged voices had been many a time
heard there, at midnight, in old days, while hooded figures knelt
and prayed around, and told their rosaries of beads.
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