I drew nearer again to my companion. I felt I was in all events safe from violence from him. And I contrasted, with humiliation, his beautiful superstition with the commonplace remembrance of a school-boy conviction of my own, one dark night, upon Blackheath, that a direction-post was a ghost.
My friend had not, indeed, always been a dreamer: and although this is no place to narrate his course of daring and hazardous adventure, on which I am therefore silent, yet I wish to be allowed to re-establish his credit for intelligence, by reporting the answer which he made, on another occasion, to a question, as to what he thought of the emancipation of the Negroes in our colonies. "The principle," answered my friend, "was good, but you were in too great a hurry. Before giving them freedom, you should have made them fit for it. They were not impatient. Slavery is an African institution. Some outlay of public money, and extreme care and prudence in your measures, would have enabled you to secure their humane treatment in the interval. As fast as they became innoculated with the wants and habits of civilised life, you might have made _freedmen_ of the most advanced, and given them official occupation, or allotted them land under proper conditions. One sheep would have followed another. The fag-end you might have emancipated together. Thirty or forty years, and a million of money, would have done the thing. The results would have been, from first to last, beneficial to the colonists. It would have set an example which other nations _could_ have followed. It would have been a noble return for having, temporarily, used the race as unmitigated slaves. It would have been an act of enlightened philanthropy. It would have become statesmen. What you did reads and works like the puerile suggestion of a school-boy's theme. What you are further doing, to suppress, by force, the trade in slaves, would have been worthy my distinguished countryman whose biography has immortalised Cervantes. Humanity would smile at it, but that she shudders and sickens."
But, to leave the region of dreams, which are no longer realisable, let us shift the scene.
The churchyard has its nightly terrors. One heard of corpse-lights seen dancing over graves--but over some alone. A few only had witnessed this; but _they_ had no doubt on the matter. Things looked "uncanny;" but time did not pause, and the story was forgotten. Even when the tale was fresh, what was it but superstition? Who of those who hugged its sympathetic terrors by the Christmas fireside, thought they could be true on the bright frosty morning of the morrow? It was mere fancy. There was nothing in it. Yet there _was_ something. And now and then a striking and mysterious event would occur to bring back the old idea. There was a cottage, (this I heard of a certainty,) in a hamlet I could name, to which a bad report attached. A room in it was haunted. More than one who had slept there had seen, at midnight, the luminous apparition of a little child standing upon the hearth-stone. At length suspicion became active. The hearth-stone was raised, and there were found, buried beneath it, the remains of an infant. A story was now divulged, how the former tenant and a female of the neighbourhood had, a very few years before, abruptly left the village. The apparition here was real and significant enough.