The Child of Waterloo, or, The Horrors of the Battle-Field — page 71: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

68 THE CHILD OF WATERLOO. with the ancient stone walls and numerous marble slabe, that the hostler recoiled again with a shiver before he could cross the time-worn threshold. Recovering himself then, he entered the silent precincts of the place, and he closed the large door behind him, and from the interior securely fastened it. : Depositing then the key securely in his pocket, he felt for the silver-mounted pistol which the sextoness had lent him, and then carrying that weapon in his hand, ready for imme- diate service, he crept slowly up the dark and solemn aisle. Noiselessly he got into one of the pews, and sitting down upon the floor, with his back supported by one of its angles, he prepared himself to wait for whatever time or chance might bring before him; and the night wore slowly on. And now the old church clock suddenly awoke, and the whole building became vocal with the sound it made. It struck eleven; he counted them stroke by stroke: the dull, sighing echoes of the strokes appeared to him endless, but at last they died away, and all was still and lonely as before. Then, in such an hour and such a place, did the lonely man give more thought to some most sad circumstances of his early hife, than ever before he should have thought it worth his while todo. The false accusation of murder seemed to have awak- ened in him a new nature, or, perhaps, more properly speaking, to have enabled him to have shaken off a number of acquired habits, which, like the rust upon the polished steel, dims its luster without taking much from its integrity. He was no longer the man we first presented him to the reader, and it was unlikely he would ever be again such an one: he felt him- self that henceforward he was unfitted for those menial duties he had so long chosen to execute. Truly those hours of re- flection in the old village church might be said to be the most important in his life. And now an hour passed away, and nothing occurred to. break the dull monotony of his lonely watch. By that time, however, the moon began to show indications of performing its beautiful office. A soft and beautiful light began to diffuse itself around; object after object became plainly visible, and there could be no difficulty in seeing any object which might move within the venerable pile. Twice now the hostler thought he heard a strange scratching noise in the direction of one of the windows; but as it was fol- lowed by nothing more for some time, he began to think it but the effect of imagination, or possibly it might be some rats or mice that infested the place. Suddenly, however, when he had nearly made up his mind to this conclusion, the noise increased, and turning his eyes in the direction whence it came, he saw some strange, dark object moving either inside or outside one of the windows, he could not tell which. It provokingly happened that that window was in the greatest gloom of all, so that, al- though he felt certain there was something like a human form attempting to get out of the church by means of the window, or comicbooks. com