s receive all the more attention.

But while death seems far more astonishing and unnatural in a city,
where the great tide of life rises and falls with little apparent
regard to the sinking wrecks, in the country it is not so. The
neighbors themselves are those who dig the grave and carry the dead,
whom they or their friends have made ready, to the last resting-place.
With all nature looking on,--the leaves that must fall, and the grass
of the field that must wither and be gone when the wind passes
over,--living closer to life and in plainer sight of death, they have
a different sense of the mysteries of existence. They pay homage to
Death rather than to the dead; they gather from the lonely farms by
scores because there is a funeral, and not because their friend is
dead; and the day of Adeline Prince's burial, the marvelous
circumstances, with which the whole town was already familiar, brought
a great company together to follow her on her last journey.

The day was warm and the sunshine fell caressingly over the pastures
as if it were trying to call back the flowers. By afternoon there was
a tinge of greenness on the slopes and under the gnarled apple-trees,
that had been lost for days before, and the distant hills and
mountains, which could be seen in a circle from the high land where
the Thacher farmhouse stood, were dim and blue through the Indian
summer haze. The old men who came to the funeral wore their faded
winter overcoats and clumsy caps all ready to be pulled down over
their ears if the wind should change; and their wives were also warmly
wrapped, with great shawls over their rounded, hard-worked shoulders;
yet they took the best warmth and pleasantness into their hearts, and
watched the sad proceedings of the afternoon with deepest interest.
The doctor came hurrying toward home just as the long procession was
going down the pasture, and he saw it crossing a low hill; a dark and
slender column with here and there a child walking beside one of the
elder mourners. The bearers went first with the bier; the track was
uneven, and the procession was lost to sight now and then behind the
slopes. It was forever a mystery; these people might have been a
company of Druid worshipers, or of strange northern priests and their
people, and the doctor checked his impatient horse as he watched the
retreating figures at their simple ceremony. He could not help
thinking what strange ways this child of the old farm had follow