I approached, while the humble sexton kindly withdrew, that I might, without witnesses, indulge that grief which he saw was the burthen of my aching heart.  The bird remained, but without dressing its plumage, without the usual air of surprise and vigilance evinced by domestic fowls, when disturbed in their haunts.  This poor creature was moulting; its feathers were rumpled and disordered; its tail ragged.  There was no beauty in the animal, which was probably only kept as a variety of the species; and it appeared to me as if it had been placed there as a lesson to myself.  In its modest attire, in its melancholy and pensive attitude, it seemed, with its gaudy plumage, to have dismissed the world and its vanities, while in mournful silence it surveyed the crowded mementoes of eternity.

“This is my office, not thine,” said I, apostrophising the bird, which, alarmed at my near approach, quitted its position, and disappeared among the surrounding tombs.  I sat down, and fixing my eyes on the name which the tablet bore, ran over, in a hurried manner, all that part of my career which had been more immediately connected with the history of Eugenia.  I remembered her many virtues; her self-devotion for my honour and happiness; her concealing herself from me, that I might not blast my prospects in life by continuing an intimacy which she saw would end in my ruin; her firmness of character, her disinterested generosity, and the refinement of attachment which made her prefer misery and solitude to her own gratification in the society of the man she loved.  She had, alas! but one fault, and that fault was loving me.  I could not drive from my thoughts, that it was through my unfortunate and illicit connection with her that I had lost all that made life dear to me.

At this moment (and not once since the morning I awoke from it) my singular dream recurred to my mind.  The thoughts which never had once during my eventful voyage from the Bahamas to the Cape, and thence to England, presented themselves in my waking hours, must certainly have possessed my brain during sleep.  Why else should it never have occurred to my rational mind that the connection with Eugenia would certainly endanger that intended with Emily?  It was Eugenia that placed Emily in mourning, out of my reach, and, as it were, on the top of the Nine-Pin Rock.

Here, then, my dream was explained; and I now felt all the horrors of that reality which I thought at the time was no more than the effect of a disordered imagination.  Yet I could not blame Eugenia; the poor girl had fallen a victim to that deplorable and sensual education which I had received in the cockpit of a man-of-war.  I, I alone was the culprit.  She was friendless, and without a parent to guide her youthful steps; she fell a victim to my ungoverned passions.  Maddened with anguish of head and heart, I threw myself violently on the grave:  I beat my miserable head against the tombstones; I called with frantic exclamation on the name of Eugenia; and at length sank on the turf, between the two graves, in a state of stupor and exhaustion, from which a copious flood of tears in some measure relieved me.