ON THE WATCH.
Upon a lowering morning late in November, with the
yellow fog low upon the flat meadows, and the blinded
cattle groping their way through the dim obscurity,
and blundering stupidly against black and leafless
hedges, or stumbling into ditches, undistinguishable
in the hazy atmosphere; with the village church looming
brown and dingy through the uncertain light; with
every winding path and cottage door, every gable end
and gray old chimney, every village child and straggling
cur seeming strange and weird of aspect in the semi-darkness,
Phoebe Marks and her Cousin Luke made their way through
the churchyard of Audley, and presented themselves
before a shivering curate, whose surplice hung in
damp folds, soddened by the morning mist, and whose
temper was not improved by his having waited five
minutes for the bride and bridegroom.
Luke Marks, dressed in his ill-fitting Sunday clothes,
looked by no means handsomer than in his every-day
apparel; but Phoebe, arrayed in a rustling silk of
delicate gray, that had been worn about half a dozen
times by her mistress, looked, as the few spectators
of the ceremony remarked, “quite the lady.”
A very dim and shadowy lady, vague of outline, and
faint of coloring, with eyes, hair, complexion and
dress all melting into such pale and uncertain shades
that, in the obscure light of the foggy November morning
a superstitious stranger might have mistaken the bride
for the ghost of some other bride, dead and buried
in the vault below the church.
Mr. Luke Marks, the hero of the occasion, thought
very little of all this. He had secured the wife
of his choice, and the object of his life-long ambition—a
public house. My lady had provided the seventy-five
pounds necessary for the purchase of the good-will
and fixtures, with the stock of ales and spirits,
of a small inn in the center of a lonely little village,
perched on the summit of a hill, and called Mount
Stanning. It was not a very pretty house to look
at; it had something of a tumble-down, weather-beaten
appearance, standing, as it did, upon high ground,
sheltered only by four or five bare and overgrown
poplars, that had shot up too rapidly for their strength,
and had a blighted, forlorn look in consequence.
The wind had had its own way with the Castle Inn,
and had sometimes made cruel use of its power.
It was the wind that battered and bent the low, thatched
roofs of outhouses and stables, till they hung over
and lurched forward, as a slouched hat hangs over
the low forehead of some village ruffian; it was the
wind that shook and rattled the wooden shutters before
the narrow casements, till they hung broken and dilapidated
upon their rusty hinges; it was the wind that overthrew
the pigeon house, and broke the vane that had been
imprudently set up to tell the movements of its mightiness;
it, was the wind that made light of any little bit
