Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

The House by the Church-Yard Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

I believe there was no moon, and the stars had been quite put out under the wet 'blanket of the night, ' which impenetrable muffler overspread the sky with a funereal darkness. There was a little of that sheet-lightning early in the evening, which betokens sultry weather. The clouds, column after column, came up sullenly over the Dublin mountains, rolling themselves from one horizon to the other into one black dome of vapour, their slow but steady motion contrasting with the awful stillness of the air. There was a weight in the atmosphere, and a sort of undefined menace brooding over the little town, as if unseen crime or danger-some mystery of iniquity-was stealing into the heart of it, and the disapproving heavens scowled a melancholy warning. That morning old Sally, the rector's housekeeper, was disquieted. She had dreamed of making the great four-post, state bed, with the dark green damask curtains-a dream that betokened some coming trouble-it might, to be sure, be ever so small-(it had once come with no worse result than Dr. Walsingham's dropping his purse, containing something under a guinea in silver, over the side of the ferry boat)-but again it might be tremendous. The omen hung over them doubtful