The House by the Church-Yard | Page 4

awful isolation, and listened to orthodox
and loyal sermons, and took French rappee; whence too, he stepped
forth between the files of the guard of honour of the Royal Irish
Artillery from the barrack over the way, in their courtly uniform, white,
scarlet, and blue, cocked hats, and cues, and ruffles, presenting
arms--into his emblazoned coach and six, with hanging footmen, as
wonderful as Cinderella's, and out-riders out-blazing the liveries of the
troops, and rolling grandly away in sunshine and dust.
The 'Ecclesiastical Commissioners' have done their office here. The
tower, indeed, remains, with half its antique growth of ivy gone; but the

body of the church is new, and I, and perhaps an elderly fellow or two
more, miss the old-fashioned square pews, distributed by a traditional
tenure among the families and dignitaries of the town and vicinage
(who are they now?), and sigh for the queer, old, clumsy reading-desk
and pulpit, grown dearer from the long and hopeless separation; and
wonder where the tables of the Ten Commandments, in long gold
letters of Queen Anne's date, upon a vivid blue ground, arched above,
and flanking the communion-table, with its tall thin rails, and fifty
other things that appeared to me in my nonage, as stable as the earth,
and as sacred as the heavens, are gone to.
As for the barrack of the Royal Irish Artillery, the great gate leading
into the parade ground, by the river side, and all that, I believe the earth,
or rather that grim giant factory, which is now the grand feature and
centre of Chapelizod, throbbing all over with steam, and whizzing with
wheels, and vomiting pitchy smoke, has swallowed them up.
A line of houses fronting this--old familiar faces--still look blank and
regretfully forth, through their glassy eyes, upon the changed scene.
How different the company they kept some ninety or a hundred years
ago!
Where is the mill, too, standing fast by the bridge, the manorial
appendage of the town, which I loved in my boyhood for its gaunt and
crazy aspect and dim interior, whence the clapper kept time
mysteriously to the drone of the mill-sluice? I think it is gone. Surely
that confounded thing can't be my venerable old friend in masquerade!
But I can't expect you, my reader--polite and patient as you manifestly
are--to potter about with me, all the summer day, through this
melancholy and mangled old town, with a canopy of factory soot
between your head and the pleasant sky. One glance, however, before
you go, you will vouchsafe at the village tree--that stalworth elm. It has
not grown an inch these hundred years. It does not look a day older
than it did fifty years ago, I can tell you. There he stands the same; and
yet a stranger in the place of his birth, in a new order of things, joyless,
busy, transformed Chapelizod, listening, as it seems to me, always to
the unchanged song and prattle of the river, with his reveries and

affections far away among by-gone times and a buried race. Thou hast
a story, too, to tell, thou slighted and solitary sage, if only the winds
would steal it musically forth, like the secret of Mildas from the
moaning reeds.
The palmy days of Chapelizod were just about a hundred years ago,
and those days--though I am jealous of their pleasant and kindly fame,
and specially for the preservation of the few memorials they have left
behind, were yet, I may say, in your ear, with all their colour and
adventure--perhaps, on the whole, more pleasant to read about, and
dream of, than they were to live in. Still their violence, follies, and
hospitalities, softened by distance, and illuminated with a sort of
barbaric splendour, have long presented to my fancy the glowing and
ever-shifting combinations upon which, as on the red embers, in a
winter's gloaming, I love to gaze, propping my white head upon my
hand, in a lazy luxury of reverie, from my own arm-chair, while they
drop, ever and anon, into new shapes, and silently tell their 'winter's
tales.'
When your humble servant, Charles de Cresseron, the compiler of this
narrative, was a boy some fourteen years old--how long ago precisely
that was, is nothing to the purpose, 'tis enough to say he remembers
what he then saw and heard a good deal better than what happened a
week ago--it came to pass that he was spending a pleasant week of his
holidays with his benign uncle and godfather, the curate of Chapelizod.
On the second day of his, or rather my sojourn (I take leave to return to
the first person), there was a notable funeral of an old lady. Her name
was Darby, and her journey to her last home was very considerable,
being made