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THE SEXTON'S COTTAGE.
We had been for some time walking over a rocky moorland covered with dry plants and mosses, when I descried a little cottage in the farthest distance.

The sun was not yet down, but he was wrapt in a gray cloud.
The heath looked as if it had never been warm, and the wind blew strangely cold, as if from some region where it was always night.
"Here we are at last!" said the raven.

"What a long way it is! In half the time I could have gone to Paradise and seen my cousin--him, you remember, who never came back to Noah! Dear! dear! it is almost winter!" "Winter!" I cried; "it seems but half a day since we left home!" "That is because we have travelled so fast," answered the raven.

"In your world you cannot pull up the plumb-line you call gravitation, and let the world spin round under your feet! But here is my wife's house! She is very good to let me live with her, and call it the sexton's cottage!" "But where is your churchyard--your cemetery--where you make your graves, I mean ?" said I, seeing nothing but the flat heath.
The raven stretched his neck, held out his beak horizontally, turned it slowly round to all the points of the compass, and said nothing.
I followed the beak with my eyes, and lo, without church or graves, all was a churchyard! Wherever the dreary wind swept, there was the raven's cemetery! He was sexton of all he surveyed! lord of all that was laid aside! I stood in the burial-ground of the universe; its compass the unenclosed heath, its wall the gray horizon, low and starless! I had left spring and summer, autumn and sunshine behind me, and come to the winter that waited for me! I had set out in the prime of my youth, and here I was already!--But I mistook.