Accordingly I descended the cliff and waited to hear the return of
the carousers. There I sat down upon the well-remembered boulder,
lost in recollections of all that had passed on those sands, while
over the sea the night spread like the widening, darkening wings of
an enormous spectral bird, whose brooding voice was the drone of the
waves as they came nearer and nearer. Then I began to think of what
lay before me, of the strangeness and wildness of my life.
Then I recalled, with a shudder I could not repress, those sepulchral
chambers beneath the church, which, owing, I believe, to the
directions in an ancestor's will, had been the means of saving it
from demolition after a large portion of the churchyard bad been
condemned as dangerous. Raxton church is the only one along the coast
that can boast a crypt: all the churches are Perpendicular in style,
too late for crypts; a fact which is supposed to indicate that Raxton
was, in very early times, a seaside town of great importance; for the
crypt is much older than the church, and of an entirely different
kind of architecture.
Pages:
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490