thoughts I fall to speculating about that old worldly-weary man, who must have been so tired of his life before God permitted him to lay it down. Surely his latter days were ghastly, grey, and lonely, with all his people and the friends of his youth lying in their graves, and no new ones to fill their places. At what period of his life, I wonder, may he have been considered to be growing a trifle elderly, and did his father whip him after he was a hundred years old? What must his tailor's bills have come to, and how many Mrs. Methuselahs and little Methuselahs may there have been? Papa is not much past forty, and he has eleven children; if he lived until he were nine hundred and sixty-nine years old, how many might he be reasonably supposed to have? That is a sum, and more than my head, unaided by slate or pencil, is good for. I have not half exhausted the subject when Mr. Skipworth blesses and dismisses us, and we are out again, pacing along the narrow path that divides these soft swelling green mounds that we call graves.
How I pity you, poor, patient, forgotten dead folk! I know that you are not here, that your spirits are transplanted to greater bliss or greater misery than the world ever gave you, but with my human heart I think of your bodies laid away in the earth's breast, not of your deathless freed souls. They have buried you away so deep that not a glimmer of God's sunshine can pierce through to your dark, narrow beds. You are hidden away so close that the gurgling song of the thrush, and the shrill call of the black-bird, can never reach or thrill you; though your best beloved were passing by, you could not stir one hair's breadth from your bondage; though you are cradled in the very heart of the earth, you cannot feel her throbbing pulses, smell her fresh flowers; her joy, her riches, and her sweetness are not for you—not for you! I am for you, O dead! just as some day some one will, perchance, be sorry for me, and looking down at the grass that grows over
