When they got into the street, he stopped to ask his guide - who
instantly retreated from him - if he knew where they were.
The savage thing looked here and there, and at length, nodding his
head, pointed in the direction he designed to take. Redlaw going
on at once, he followed, something less suspiciously; shifting his
money from his mouth into his hand, and back again into his mouth,
and stealthily rubbing it bright upon his shreds of dress, as he
went along.
Three times, in their progress, they were side by side. Three
times they stopped, being side by side. Three times the Chemist
glanced down at his face, and shuddered as it forced upon him one
reflection.
The first occasion was when they were crossing an old churchyard,
and Redlaw stopped among the graves, utterly at a loss how to
connect them with any tender, softening, or consolatory thought.
The second was, when the breaking forth of the moon induced him to
look up at the Heavens, where he saw her in her glory, surrounded
by a host of stars he still knew by the names and histories which
human science has appended to them; but where he saw nothing else
he had been wont to see, felt nothing he had been wont to feel, in
looking up there, on a bright night.
The third was when he stopped to listen to a plaintive strain of
music, but could only hear a tune, made manifest to him by the dry
mechanism of the instruments and his own ears, with no address to
any mystery within him, without a whisper in it of the past, or of
the future, powerless upon him as the sound of last year's running
water, or the rushing of last year's wind.
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