I had waked just in time, though I hadn't
deserved to do so, and ought, by right, to have missed it all. I tried
to make my wife come with me; but after the family is of a certain size
a woman, if she is a real woman, thinks her husband can see things for
her, and generally sends him out to reconnoitre and report. Besides, my
wife couldn't have left the children without waking them, to tell them
she was going, and then all five of them would have wanted to come with
us, including the baby; and we should have had no end of a time
convincing them of the impossibility. We were a good deal bound up in
the children, and we hated to lie to them when we could possibly avoid
it. So I went alone.

"I asked the night porter, who was still on duty, the way I wanted to
take, but there were so many people in the streets going the same
direction that I couldn't have missed it, anyhow; and pretty soon we
came to the old Moravian cemetery, which was in the heart of the town;
and there we found most of the Moravian congregation drawn up on three
sides of the square, waiting and facing the east, which was beginning to
redden. Of all the cemeteries I have seen, that was the most beautiful,
because it was the simplest and humblest. Generally a cemetery is a
dreadful place, with headstones and footstones and shafts and tombs
scattered about, and looking like a field full of granite and marble
stumps from the clearing of a petrified forest. But here all the
memorial tablets lay flat with the earth. None of the dead were assumed
to be worthier of remembrance than another; they all rested at regular
intervals, with their tablets on their breasts, like shields, in their
sleep after the battle of life. I was thinking how right and wise this
was, and feeling the purity of the conception like a quality of the
keen, clear air of the morning, which seemed to be breathing straight
from the sky, when suddenly the sun blazed up from the horizon like a
fire, and the instant it appeared the horns of the band began to blow
and the people burst into a hymn--a thousand voices, for all I know. It
was the sublimest thing I ever heard, and I don't know that there's
anything to match it for dignity and solemnity in any religious rite. It
made the tears come, for I thought how those people were of a church of
missionaries and martyrs from the beginning, and I felt as if I were
standing in sight and hearing of the first Christians after Christ. It
was as if He w