The travellers on the road look with wide eyes at the grim
apparition, and flee. They arrive at the rough five-bar stile; it is
thrown back, and the hearse is driven into the place of the dead. The
story goes on. There is silence everywhere, and appropriately there,
where the four brick corners of the smoke-coloured Cradle rise from the
hollow of Balgay Hill. They waited till the moon shone out again in her
calm, breathless repose; and then resounded from the clanging black
boards of the hearse a terrible din resembling thunder, and already each
man, with his table-cover rolled round him, was snug behind the solemn
head-stones, storied with domestic loves severed by the dark angel.
Now was the time for the trumpet-call, which behoved to be sounded by
the cycloborean lungs of the broad-chested Panmure. The story has no
reason to flag where the stake of the _grimelinage_ is the upraising of
white-robed spirits. The sour-milk horn is sounded as it never was
sounded before on the earth which had passed away; every spirit comes
forth from below the head-stones; and there rose a wail of misery which
nothing but wine could have produced.
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