[The Circular Study by Anna Katharine Green]@TWC D-Link bookThe Circular Study CHAPTER X 18/25
He says (it was six years after the tragic scene I have just related) that one evening as he was hurrying by the churchyard, in great anxiety to reach home before it was too dark, he came upon the figure of a man standing beside a grave, with a little child in his arms.
This man was tall, long-bearded, and terrifying.
His attitude, as the lad describes it, was one of defiance, if not of cursing.
High in his right hand he held the child, almost as if he would hurl him at the village which lies under the hill on which the churchyard is perched; and though the moment passed quickly, the boy, now a man, never has forgotten the picture thus presented or admitted that it was anything but a real one. As the description he gave of this man answered to the appearance of Amos Cadwalader, and as the shoe of a little child was found next morning on the grave of Cadwalader's daughter, Evelyn, it has been thought by many that the boy really beheld this old soldier, who for some mysterious reason had chosen nightfall for this fleeting visit to his daughter's resting-place.
But to others it was only a freak of the lad's imagination, which had been much influenced by the reading of romances.
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