University of Virginia Library

12. XII.

Midnight overspread the city; the clouds hung low and
gloomy, and the atmosphere was close and oppressive, when a
man past the prime of life, miserably clad, might have been
seen stealthily threading through by-ways and alleys, now

stopping and looking noiselessly backward and forward, and
then, with trembling and unsteady steps, gliding forward. He
wore no hat, his gray hair was matted, and over one eye was
a purple and ghastly cut, from which he seemed to have torn
the bandage, for in one hand he held a cloth spotted with blood.
He apparently thought himself followed by an enemy, from
whom he was endeavoring to escape, and now and then he huddled
in some dark nook whence his eyes, bright with insanity,
peered vigilantly about. So, by fits and starts, he made his
way to the old graveyard where the poor are buried. The
trees stood still together, for there was scarcely a breath of air,
and he proceeded noiselessly among the monuments and crosses
and low headstones, never pausing, till he came to a little new
grave, the rounded mound of which was smooth and fresh as if
it had been raised but a single hour.

“Here,” he said, squatting on the ground and digging madly
but feebly into the earth with his hands, “here is the very place
they put him, d—n them! but his mother shall have him back;
I ain't so drunk that I can't dig him up;” and pausing now and
then to listen, he soon levelled the heap of earth above his
child.

“In God's name, what are you doing?” exclaimed an authoritative
voice, and a club was struck forcibly against the
board fence hard by. Howling an impious imprecation, the
frightened wretch rushed blindly and headlong across the
graves, leaped the fence like a tiger, and disappeared in the
hollow beyond. An hour afterwards he had gained the valley
which lies a mile or two northwest of the city, and along which
a creek, sometimes slow and sluggish, and sometimes deep and
turbulent, drags and hurries itself toward the brighter waters
of the Ohio.

The white-trunked sycamores leaned toward each other across
the stream, the broad faded leaves dropping slowly slantwise
to the ground, as the wind slipped damp and silent from bough
to bough. Here and there the surface of the water was darkened
by rifts of foliage that, lodged among brushwood, gave
shelter to the checky blacksnake and the white-bellied toad.
Huge logs that had drifted together in the spring freshet, lay

black and rotting in the current, with noxious weeds springing
rank from their decay.

Toward the deepest water the wretched creature seemed
irresistibly drawn, and holding with one hand to a sapling that
grew in the bank, he leaned far out and tried the depth with a
slender pole. He then retreated, and seemed struggling as with
a fierce temptation, but drew near again and with his foot
broke off shelving weights of earth, and watched their plashing
and sinking; a moment he lifted his eyes to heaven—there
was a heavier plunge—and he was gone from the bank. A wild
cry rose piercing through the darkness; the crimson top of a
clump of iron weeds that grew low in the bank was drawn suddenly
under the water, as if the hand reached for help, then the
cry and the plashing were still, and the waves closed together.
A week afterwards the swollen corpse of Jenny's father was
drawn from the stream.