Well, it signified, of course, nothing that the Black
Princess had been buried there, so far away from the land of "the balmy
East,"
"Where the roses blow and the oranges grow,
And all is divine but man below."
Fletcher Read might have recollected this, but what though? Was not the
pun a good one--worthy of Hood? They all mounted the hearse, Panmure
being driver; nor could Sandy Morren give to these white-robed spirits,
who were so soon to rise in glory from the envious earth, more than a
sour-milk horn and half a dozen of snow-white table-cloths for the
theatrical property of the great players. So it has been since the time
when the shepherd who killed the son of Aebolus, for that he gave them
wine which they thought was poison, because they found their heads out
of order--wine still generates on folly the afflatus of madness. The
story goes on. The night was as dark as those places they were to
illumine with their white robes, alas! not of innocence. But the
darkness was not of the moon's absence in another hemisphere; only that
darkness which is cloud-born, and must cede in twinkling yet glorious
intervening moments to the moon, when she will salute the graves and the
marriage-guests; and the hearse, as it slowly wended its way up the road
to Lochee, every now and then pouring forth from its dark inside peals
of laughter.
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