are and
gaunt, its dark outline clearly cut against the moonlit sky, each
window coldly gleaming in the pale light, while the scattered
headstones, sheeted in mist, stood out like groups of mourners
mute in their sorrow over the dead. Below lay the village--that
little tragic centre of life and death--half its inhabitants in
sleep, hushed for a few brief hours in their humble moorland
nests. The fall of waters from the weir at the Bridge Factory came
up from the valley in dreamy cadences; a light dimly burned in old
Joseph's window; and a meteor swept with a mighty arc the western
sky. The soul of Moses Fletcher was at peace.

He sprang with a light step over the low wall of boundary, and
crossed the wave-like mounds that heaved as a grassy sea, and
beneath which lay the unlettered dead, the long grasses writhing
and clinging to his feet, as though loath to let him escape the
dust upon which they fed and grew so rank. Heedless of their
greedy embrace, he walked with long stride towards the lower end
of the yard, until he stood before a gray and lichen-covered slab,
on which were letters old and new. There, by the moonlight, he
read the record of a baby boy of two, carrying back the reader
forty years. Above it was the name of a father, dead these ten
years, and between these, all newly cut, were the lines:

JINNY CRAWSHAW,

WIFE OF THE ABOVE, WHO DEPARTED THIS
LIFE,
----- -----

For some moments Moses stood before the stone; then, taking the
hat from his head, he knelt down on the cold grass and, kissing
the newly-cut name, he vowed a vow. If, with the power of his
Master, whom he had only just begun to serve, he could have raised
the sleeper, as Lazarus and the widow's son and the ruler's little
child were raised, then the great grief of his heart would have
disappeared. But he could not--the past, _his_ past, was
irrevocable. But there were the living--Jim Crawshaw, his wife,
his babe--these were still within his reach of recompense. And
again he vowed his vow, and the still night air carried it far
beyond the distant stars to where He sits who knows the thoughts
and tries the reins of men.

* * * * *

'Thaa'rt lat' to-neet, Moses; where hasto bin?'

'Nowhere where thaa couldn't go wi' me, lass,' and so saying,
Moses kissed his wife, an act which he had dexterously and
passionately performed several times since hi