To linger when the sun of life, The beam that gilt its path is gone-- To feel the aching bosom's strife, When _Hope_ is dead, but _Love_ lives on. ANONYMOUS.
Meanwhile, without recognising Clermistonlee, and not aware that he had been recognized by him, poor Walter, who was of that temperament which is easily raised and depressed, turned away from the gate, crushed beneath the load of a thousand fears at the sight of so gay a cavalier caracoling down the avenue of Bruntisfield.
His heart was overcharged with melancholy reflections. "I have been away for five years--in all that time we have never heard of each other. Oh, what if she should have deemed me dead!"
Drawing his last shilling from his pocket, the unfortunate cavalier entered a poor change-house by the wayside, where a great signboard creaking on an iron rod and representing a portrait in a red coat and white wig, and having a tremendously hooked nose, imported that it was the 'King William's head,' kept by Lucky Elshender, who promised good entertainment for "man and beast."
The small clay-floored apartment, with its well-scrubbed bunkers, and rack of shining plates and tin trenchers, kirn-babies on the mantelpiece, and blazing ingle, where turf and wood burned cheerfully in a clumsy iron basket, supported by four massive legs, looked very snug and comfortable.
A personage evidently a divine, long visaged and dark featured, with his lanky sable hair falling on his Geneva bands and coat of rusty black, sat warming his spindle legs at the warm hearth, and smoking a long pipe, on the bowl of which he fixed his great lack lustre eyes with an expression of the deepest abstraction. It was the Reverend Mr. Ichabod Bummel, who came every evening as regularly as six o'clock struck, to smoke a pipe, and hear the passing news at the change-house kept by his aunt-in-law old Elsie, and to bore every traveller who was disposed to hear the abstruse theology and ponderous arguments advanced in his _Bombshell_, for that immortal work had been printed at last, in thick quarto, and a copy of it now lay under his elbow all ready for action against the first good-natured listener or fool-hardy disputant.
In person this redoubtable champion of toleration was as lean as ever, though the goods and chattels of this world had flowed amply upon him of late, notwithstanding the oppression and famine of the time. He had cautiously purchased various tofts and pendicles on the banks of the Powburn, and to these he gave hard and unusual scriptural names, which they bear unto this day, and which the curious may find by consulting the City Directory. One he named the Land of Canaan, another the Land of Goshen, the Land of Egypt, Hebron, and so forth, while the little runnel that traverses them was exalted into the waters of Jordan. Meinie, whom he had espoused, had "proved," as he said, "ane fruitful vine," for she had brought him four sons, all long-visaged, hollow-eyed, and sepulchral counterparts of himself, and he named them Shem, Ham, Japhet, and Ichabod.
