Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/179

 grow older. We need not seek in dismal churchyards nor sleep in moated granges, to see their shadowy faces, and hear the rustling of their garments in the night. Every house, every room, every creaking chair has its own particular ghost. They haunt the empty chambers of our lives, they throng around us like dead leaves, whirled in the autumn wind. Some are living, some are dead. We know not. We clasped their hands once, loved them, quarrelled with them, laughed with them, told them our thoughts and hopes and aims, as they told us theirs, till it seemed our very hearts had joined in a grip that would defy the puny power of Death. They are gone now; lost to us for ever. Their eyes will never look into ours again, and their voices we shall never hear. Only their ghosts come to us, and talk with us. We see them, dim and shadowy, through our tears. We stretch our yearning hands to them, but they are air.

Ghosts! They are with us night and day. They walk beside us in the busy street, under the glare of the sun. They sit by us in the twilight at home. We see their little faces looking from the windows of the old schoolhouse. We meet them in the woods and lanes, where we shouted and played as boys. Hark! cannot you hear their low laughter from behind the blackberry bushes, and their distant whoops along the grassy glades? Down here, through the quiet fields, and by the wood, where the evening shadows are lurking,