rofusion, and soft patches of violets smiled to meet the
spring. Here were, indeed, great riches, "a little of everything" that
pasture life affords: a hardy bed of checkerberry, crimson strawberries
nodding on long stalks, and in one sequestered corner the beloved
Linnaea. It seemed a consecrated pasture shut off from daily use, and so
given up to pleasantness that you could scarcely walk there without
setting foot on some precious outgrowth of the spring, or pushing aside
a summer loveliness better made for wear.

Ambition had its fulfillment. We bought our Cemetery, a large, green
tract, quite square, and lying open to the sun. But our pendulum had
swung too wide. Like many folk who suffer from one discomfort, we had
gone to the utmost extreme and courted another. We were tired of
climbing hills, and so we pressed too far into the lowland; and the
first grave dug in our Cemetery showed three inches of water at the
bottom. It was in "Prince's new lot," and there his young daughter was
to lie. But her lover had stood by while the men were making the grave;
and, looking into the ooze below, he woke to the thought of her fair
young body there.

"God!" they heard him say, "she sha'n't lay so. Leave it as it is, an'
come up into the old buryin'-ground. There's room enough by me."

The men, all mates of his, stopped work without a glance and followed
him; and up there in the dearer shrine her place was made. The father
said but a word at her changed estate. Neighbors had hurried in to bring
him the news; he went first to the unfinished grave in the Cemetery, and
then strode up the hill, where the men had not yet done. After watching
them for a while in silence, he turned aside; but he came back to drop a
trembling hand upon the lover's arm.

"I guess," he said miserably, "she'd full as lieves lay here by you."

And she will be quite beside him, though, in the beaten ways of earth,
others have come between. For years he lived silently and apart; but
when his mother died, and he and his father were left staring at the
dulled embers of life, he married a good woman, who perhaps does not
deify early dreams; yet she is tender of them, and at the death of her
own child it was she who went toiling up to the graveyard, to see that
its little place did not encroach too far. She gave no reason, but we
all knew it was because she meant to let her husband lie there by the
long-loved guest.

Naturally enough, after this incident o