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Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 1814-1873

"Uncle Silas A Tale of Bartram-Haugh"


'Is this your house, my little men?' he asked of the children--pretty
little rosy boys--who assented; and he leaned with his open hand against
the stem of one of the trees, and with a grave smile he nodded down to me,
saying--
'You see now, and hear, and _feel_ for yourself that both the vision and
the story were quite true; but come on, my dear, we have further to go.'
And relapsing into silence we had a long ramble through the wood, the same
on which I was now looking in the distance. Every now and then he made me
sit down to rest, and he in a musing solemn sort of way would relate some
little story, reflecting, even to my childish mind, a strange suspicion
of a spiritual meaning, but different from what honest Mrs. Rusk used
to expound to me from the Parables, and, somehow, startling in its very
vagueness.
Thus entertained, though a little awfully, I accompanied the dark
mysterious little 'whipper-snapper' through the woodland glades. We came,
to me quite unexpectedly, in the deep sylvan shadows, upon the grey,
pillared temple, four-fronted, with a slanting pedestal of lichen-stained
steps, the lonely sepulchre in which I had the morning before seen poor
mamma laid.


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