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more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help
trembling when he sees a camel. Besides, he had that mental combination
which is at once humble in the region of mystery and keen in the region
of knowledge: it was the depth of his reverence quite as much as
his hard common sense which gave him his disinclination to doctrinal
religion, and he often checked Seth's argumentative spiritualism by
saying, "Eh, it's a big mystery; thee know'st but little about it." And
so it happened that Adam was at once penetrating and credulous. If a
new building had fallen down and he had been told that this was a divine
judgment, he would have said, "May be; but the bearing o' the roof and
walls wasn't right, else it wouldn't ha' come down"; yet he believed
in dreams and prognostics, and to his dying day he bated his breath a
little when he told the story of the stroke with the willow wand. I
tell it as he told it, not attempting to reduce it to its natural
elements--in our eagerness to explain impressions, we often lose our
hold of the sympathy that comprehends them.

But he had the best antidote against imaginative dread in the necessity
for getting on with the coffin, and for the next ten minutes his hammer
was ringing so uninterruptedly, that other sounds, if there were any,
might well be overpowered. A pause came, however, when he had to take
up his ruler, and now again came the strange rap, and again Gyp howled.
Adam was at the door without the loss of a moment; but again all was
still, and the starlight showed there was nothing but the dew-laden
grass in front of the cottage.

Adam for a moment thought uncomfortably about his father; but of late
years he had never come home at dark hours from Treddleston, and
there was every reason for believing that he was then sleeping off his
drunkenness at the "Waggon Overthrown." Besides, to Adam, the conception
of the future was so inseparable from the painful image of his father
that the fear of any fatal accident to him was excluded by the deeply
infixed fear of his continual degradation. The next thought that
occurred to him was one that made him slip off his shoes and tread
lightly upstairs, to listen at the bedroom doors. But both Seth and his
mother were breathing regularly.

Adam came down and set to work again, saying to himself, "I won't open
the door again. It's no use staring about to catch sight of a sound.
Maybe there's a world about us as we can't see, but th' ear's quicker
than the eye and catches a sound from't now and then. Some people think
they get a sight on't too, but they're mostly folks whose eyes are not
much use to 'em at anything else. For my part, I think it's better to
see when your perpendicular's true than to see a ghost."

Such thoughts as these are apt to grow stronger and stronger as daylight
quenches the candles and the birds begin to sing. By the time the red
sunlight shone on the brass nails that formed the initials on the lid of
the coffin, any lingering foreboding from the sound of the willow

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