hat
would, if deciphered and communicated to our readers, anticipate our
story, and claim the ready tear before our own sympathies are relieved
by our recital. We pass it by at present, to give some idea of the
extraordinary spot where it lies. This ground of the dead, or "Death's
Mailing," as it has sometimes been called, is invested with all the
_charms_ of a sublimed melancholy, which contemplates nature as a whole,
and looks to those high purposes of her great author in visiting poor
mortals with their heart-chastening woes. At the time of which we speak,
this place of the dead was entirely surrounded with high oaks and
spreading elms, except where the silvery Kirtle embraced the hallowed
spot, as she rolled slowly along--more slowly, it might almost appear,
at this spot than elsewhere--and murmured a soft threnody in the ears of
the guardian spirits, that there tended the clay forms which they once
animated. A few very rude stones, whose rudeness was their greatest
recommendation to the sentimental mind, told, in the quaint "old Inglis"
of that day, their simple tale. "Here lyethe the race of ye sons of
Kirconnelle," might have been seen on a rude freestone that has long
since disappeared. "Terraughtie did choose to lie her," appeared upon
another old relic; and some exhibited more simple tokens--still pointing
out nothing more than name and surname, yet more eloquent in that
brevity than the most "storied urn." "Jon Kirkpatrycke," "Andrew
Welles," "Heln Johnston," "Mary of the Le'," without one word more to
say what they were, where they lived, when they visited this scene of
sorrow, and when they departed from it, possessed an eloquence in their
simple brevity that moved the heart of the visiter with a power now
little felt and less appreciated. The swelling green tumuli, with these
simple-speaking, grey-headed stones, standing, yet leaning to a side, as
if themselves bent by the hands of time, how humbly might they appear,
encircled as they were, with the proud monarch of the wood, the primeval
oak, that had seen the sires and grandsires of the lowly inhabitants of
"Death's Mailing" rise and fall, and become dust, as man contemplates
the day-fly wing forth in the morning, live out its day, and die. Such
was the romantic burying-place of Kirconnel at the time of which we
speak; and even now, when the oak has fallen before the axe of
civilisation, and Fame's trump has sounded even over the tomb, the place
has a hal