Until now he had been occasionally favored with an answering and kind look
from one or the other of these single hearted and affectionate girls, both
of whom he so warmly loved, though with sentiments so different. It seemed
that they too had at last left him to his isolated and hopeless existence.
Sensible that this passing thought was weak and unmanly, the young man
renewed his walk, and instead of turning as before, he moved slowly on,
stopping only when he had reached the opening of the little chapel of the
dead.
Unlike the building lower down the path, the bone-house at the convent is
divided into two apartments; the exterior, and one that may be called the
interior, though both are open to the weather. The former contained piles
of disjointed human bones, bleached by the storms that beat in at the
windows, while the latter is consecrated to the covering of those that
still preserve, in their outward appearance at least, some of the more
familiar traces of humanity. The first had its usual complement of
dissevered and confounded fragments, in which the remains of young and
old, of the two sexes, the fierce and the meek, the penitent and the
sinner, lay in indiscriminate confusion--an eloquent reproach to the pride
of man; while the walls of the last supported some twenty blackened and
shrivelled effigies of the race, to show to what a pass of disgusting and
frightful deformity the human form can be reduced, when deprived of that
noble principle which likens it to its Divine Creator.
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