noon
Among those secluded nooks there is very little stir or movement after dark . There is little enough in the high tide of the day , but there is next to none at night . Besides that the cheerfully frequented High Street lies nearly parallel to the spot -LRB- the old Cathedral rising between the two -RRB- , and is the natural channel in which the Cloisterham traffic flows , a certain awful hush pervades the ancient pile , the cloisters , and the churchyard , after dark , which not many people care to encounter . Ask the first hundred citizens of Cloisterham , met at random in the streets at noon , if they believed in Ghosts , they would tell you no ; but put them to choose at night between these eerie Precincts and the thoroughfare of shops , and you would find that ninety-nine declared for the longer round and the more frequented way . The cause of this is not to be found in any local superstition that attaches to the Precincts -- albeit a mysterious lady , with a child in her arms and a rope dangling from her neck , has been seen flitting about there by sundry witnesses as intangible as herself -- but it is to be sought in the innate shrinking of dust with the breath of life in it from dust out of which the breath of life has passed ; also , in the widely diffused , and almost as widely unacknowledged , reflection : ` If the dead do , under any circumstances , become visible to the living , these are such likely surroundings for the purpose that I , the living , will get out of them as soon as I can . ' Hence , when Mr. Jasper and Durdles pause to glance around them , before descending into the crypt by a small side door , of which the latter has a key , the whole expanse of moonlight in their view is utterly deserted . One might fancy that the tide of life was stemmed by Mr. Jasper 's own gatehouse .