As I copied Mrs. Rebecca's quaint epistles, in the midnight stillness, the things of which I was writing arose before me like a picture. I could see the blue parlour that Sunday evening; the sober couple seated primly opposite to each other; the china monsters on the high chimneypiece; the blue-and-white Dutch tiles, with queer squat figures of Flemish citizens on foot and on horseback; the candles burning dimly on the spindle-legged table—two poor pale flames reflected ghastly in the dark polished panels of the wainscot; the big open Bible on an adjacent table; the old silver tankard, and buckhorn-handled knives and forks set out for supper; the solemn eight-day clock, ticking drearily in the corner; and amid all that sombre old-fashioned comfort, gray-haired Matthew sighing and lamenting for his vanished youth.

I have grown strangely romantic since I have fallen in love with Charlotte Halliday. The time was when I should have felt nothing but a flippant ignorant contempt for poor Haygarth's feeble sighings and lamentings; but now I think of him with a sorrowful tenderness, and am more interested in his poor commonplace life, that picture, and those two locks of hair, than in the most powerful romance that ever emanated from mortal genius. It has been truly said, that truth is stranger than fiction: may it not as justly be said, that truth has a power to touch the human heart which is lacking in the most sublime flights of a Shakespeare, or the grandest imaginings of an Aeschylus? One is sorry for the fate of Agamemnon; but one is infinitely more sorrowful for the cruel death of that English Richard in the dungeon at Pomfret, who was a very insignificant person as compared to the king of men and of ships.

Chapter III - Hunting the Judsons

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