there's no berryin' i' th' yard this afternoon.'

'I don't understand you, Joseph,' said Mr. Penrose wonderingly.

'We never berry here after four o'clock.'

'But there's no law forbidding a funeral at any hour that I know
of--is there?'

'There is wi' me. I'm maisther o' this berryin' hoile, whatever
yo' may be o' th' chapel. But they're comin', so I'll oppen th'
chapel durs.'

Old Joseph, as he was called, had been grave-digger at Rehoboth
for upwards of fifty years, and so rooted were his customs that
none cared to call them in question. For minister and deacons he
showed little respect. Boys and girls fled from before his shadow;
and the village mothers frightened their offspring when naughty by
threatening to 'fotch owd Joseph to put them in th' berryhoile.'
The women held him in awe, declaring that he sat up at night in
the graveyard to watch for corpse-candles. Even the shrewd and
hard-headed did not care to thwart him, preferring to be friends
rather than foes. Fathers, sons and sons' sons--generation after
generation--had been laid to rest by the sinewy arms of Joseph.
They came, and they departed; but he, like the earth, remained. A
gray, gaunt Tithonus, him 'only cruel immortality consumed.'

The graveyard at Rehoboth was his kingdom. Here, among the tombs,
he reigned with undisputed sway. Whether marked by lettered stone
or grassy mound, it mattered little--he knew where each rude
forefather of the hamlet lay. Rich in the family lore of the
neighbourhood, he could trace back ancestry and thread his way
through the maze of relationship to the third and fourth
generations. He could recount the sins which had hurried men to
untimely graves, and point to the spot where their bones were
rotting; and he could tell of virtues that made the memory of the
mouldering dust more fragrant than the sweetbriar and the rose
that grew upon the graves.

There was one rule which old Joseph would never break, and that
was that there should be no interments after four o'clock. Plead
with him, press him, threaten him, it was to no purpose; flinch he
would not for rich or for poor, for parson or for people. More
than once he had driven the mourners back from the gates, and one
winter's afternoon, when the corpse had been brought a long
distance, it was left for the night in a neighbouring barn. Upon
this occasion a riot was with difficulty averted. But old Joseph
stood firm, and at the risk of his life carried the day.