beside
the sea, a hill grown thick with ancient wood. The roots come sometimes
under the walls and below the old tombstones and set them ajee upon
their bases, but wanting those tall and overhanging companions,
the yard, I feel, would be ugly and incomplete. It is in a soothing
melancholy one may hear the tide lapping on the rocks below and the
wood-bird call in the trees above. They have been doing so in the ears
of Kilmalieu for numberless generations, those voices everlasting but
unheard by the quiet folk sleeping snug and sound among the clods. Sun
shines there and rain falls on it till it soaks to the very bones of
the old Parson, first to lie there, and in sun or rain there grow the
laurel-bushes that have the smell of death, and the gay flowers cluster
in a profusion found nowhere else in the parish except it be in the
garden of the Duke. The lily nods in the wind, the columbine hangs
its bell, there the snowdrop first appears and the hip-rose shows her
richest blossoms. On Sundays the children go up and walk among the
stones over the graves of their grandfathers and they smell the flowers
they would not pluck. Sometimes they will put a cap on the side of a
cherub head that tops a stone and the humour of the grinning face will
create a moment's laughter, but it is soon checked and they walk among
the graves in a more seemly peace.

They buried the goodwife of Ladyfield in her appointed place beside
her husband and her only child, Gilian taking a cord at the head of the
coffin as it was lowered into the red jaws of the grave prepared for it.
The earth thudded on the lid, the spades patted the mould, the people
moved off, and he was standing yet, listening to the bird that shook
a song of passionate melody from its little throat as it becked upon a
table tombstone. It was a simple song, he had heard it a thousand times
before and wondered at the hidden meaning of it, and now it puzzled him
anew that it should encroach upon so solemn an hour in thoughtless love
or merriment.

The men were on their way home over the New Bridge, treading heavily,
and yet light-headed, for they had the Paymaster's dram at the "lifting"
at Ladyfield in them, and the Paymaster himself was narrating to old
Rixa, the Sheriff, and Donacha Breck his story, told a hundred times
before, of Long Dan MacIntyre, who never came up past the New Bridge,
except at the tail of a funeral, for fear the weight should some day
bring the massive masonry