CHAPTER IV.
'Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap.' For reasons of his own, Stephen Smith was stirring a short time after dawn the next morning.

From the window of his room he could see, first, two bold escarpments sloping down together like the letter V.Towards the bottom, like liquid in a funnel, appeared the sea, gray and small.
On the brow of one hill, of rather greater altitude than its neighbour, stood the church which was to be the scene of his operations.

The lonely edifice was black and bare, cutting up into the sky from the very tip of the hill.

It had a square mouldering tower, owning neither battlement nor pinnacle, and seemed a monolithic termination, of one substance with the ridge, rather than a structure raised thereon.

Round the church ran a low wall; over-topping the wall in general level was the graveyard; not as a graveyard usually is, a fragment of landscape with its due variety of chiaro-oscuro, but a mere profile against the sky, serrated with the outlines of graves and a very few memorial stones.