midnight
No wonder poor Salemina slipped and twisted her ankle as she alighted from the carriage ! Though walking without help is still an impossibility , twenty-four hours of rubbing and bathing and bandaging have made it possible for her to limp discreetly , and we all went to St. Patrick 's Cathedral together this morning . We had been in the quiet churchyard , where a soft , misty rain was falling on the yellow acacias and the pink hawthorns . We had stood under the willow-tree in the deanery garden -- the tree that marks the site of the house from which Dean Swift watched the movements of the torches in the cathedral at the midnight burial of Stella . They are lying side by side at the foot of a column in the south side of the nave , and a brass plate in the pavement announces : -- ` Here lies Mrs. Hester Johnson , better known to the world by the name of Stella , under which she is celebrated in the writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift , Dean of this Cathedral . ' Poor Stella , at rest for a century and a half beside the man who caused her such pangs of love and grief -- who does not mourn her ? The nave of the cathedral was dim , and empty of all sightseers save our own group .