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Rh, kept a prudent silence, indeed ashamed to express hopes which might prove fallacious; and the agent, or man of business, who alone knew exactly how matters stood, maintained a countenance of mysterious importance, as if determined to preserve the full interest of anxiety and suspense.

At length they arrived at the churchyard gates, and from thence, amid the gaping of some dozen of idle women with infants in their arms, and accompanied by some twenty children who ran gambolling and screaming alongside of the sable procession, they finally arrived at the burial place of the Singleside family. This was a square enclosure, guarded on one side by a veteran angel, without a nose, and having only one wing, who had the merit of having maintained his post for a century, while his comrade cherub, who had stood centinel on the corresponding pedestal, lay a broken trunk among the hemlock, burdock and nettles, which grew