What we
must mind, it cannot be silly to mind."
"I am in no mood, I fear, for philosophy," she rejoined, trying to
smile. "It has taken such a hold of me that I cannot get rid of it,
and there is no one I could tell it to but you; any one else would
laugh at me; but you never laugh at anybody!
"I went to bed as well as usual, only a little troubled about my
uncle's strangeness, and soon fell asleep, to find myself presently
in a most miserable place. It was like a brick-field--but a deserted
brick-field. Heaps of broken and half-burnt bricks were all about.
For miles and miles they stretched around me. I walked fast to get
out of it. Nobody was near or in sight; there was not a sign of
human habitation from horizon to horizon.
"All at once I saw before me a dreary church. It was old,
tumble-down, and dirty--not in the least venerable--very ugly--a
huge building without shape, like most of our churches. I shrank
from the look of it: it was more horrible to me than I could account
for; I feared it. But I must go in--why, I did not know, but I must:
the dream itself compelled me.
"I went in. It looked as if nobody had crossed its threshold for a
hundred years. The pews were mouldering away; the canopy over the
pulpit had half fallen, and rested its edge on the book-board; the
great galleries had in parts tumbled into the body of the church, in
other parts they hung sloping from the walls.
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