Standing Alone In This Fair Solitude, As Much Alone As If We Had
Been On Some Fairy Isle Of A Distant Sea, We Felt That We Were
Surrounded By A Strange, Mysterious Presence, And Thoughts And
Fancies, Like Weird Articulate Voices Of Those Ancient People,
Filled The Solemn Place.
The aged trees sighed in the evening
wind, telling over and over their mournful legends, lest they
forget.
The storm-swept maples repeated their "rhythmical runes
of these unremembered ages." We allowed ourselves to sink
soothingly beneath deep waves of primitive emotions until we
seemed to perceive the sagas that the maples told the elms of a
more remote history than that of the Pharaohs or storied Greece.
Darkness began to settle over this lonely spot. Along the silent
and gloomy road we seemed to see shadowlike forms that flitted
here and there through the blackness of darkest night, a
blackness only relieved by a few stars that peered like silent
spectators from the dark draperies of clouds. Now a band of
people was seen moving not swiftly to the accompaniment of
martial music, but slowly and silently to the sighing night
wind. As we watched a lurid flame burst from the center of the
oval while a strange figure bent over it as he performed his
weird mystical rites. Now the light from the red and yellow
flames fell upon a vast group of dark figures and a thousand
gleaming eyes peered out of the velvety canopy around us. The
mournful distressing notes of the ghost bird broke the
stillness.
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