suddenly been almost
overpowered by the contrast presented: the deep brooding solemnity,
the holy hush, the pervading indwelling atmosphere of true sanctity
that distinguishes the latter?

Could any other than the simple ancient churchyard of bygone days
have suggested that sweetest, purest, noblest elegy in our mother
tongue? Do not our hearts yearn with an intense and tender longing
toward that church, at whose font we were baptized, at whose
communion-table we reverently bowed, before whose altar we breathed
the marriage vows, from whose silent chancel we shall one day be
softly and slowly borne away to our last, long sleep? Why not lay us
down to rest, where the organ that pealed at our wedding and sobbed
its requiem over our senseless clay may still breathe its loving
dirges across our graves in winter's leaden storms, or in fragrant
amber-aired summer days? Would worldly vampires, such as political or
financial schemes, track a man's footsteps down the aisle, and flap
their fatal numbing pinions over his soul so securely even in the
Sanctuary of the Lord, if from his family pew his eyes wandered now
and then to the marble slab that lay like a benediction over the
silver head of an honoured father or mother, or the silent form of a
beloved wife, sister, or brother?

Is there a woman so callous, so steeped in folly, that the tinsel of
Vanity Fair, the paraphernalia of fashion, or all the thousand small
fiends that beleaguer the female soul, could successfully lure her
imagination from holy themes, when sitting in front of the pulpit,
she yet sees through the open windows where butterflies like happy
souls flutter in and out the motionless chiselled cenotaph that rests
like a sentinel above the pulseless heart that once enshrined her
image, called her wife, and beat in changeless devotion against her
own; or the little grassy billow sown thick with violets that speak
to her of the blue eyes beneath them, where in dreamless slumber that
needs no mother's cradling arms, no maternal lullaby, reposes the
waxen form, the darling golden head of her long-lost baby? What spot
so peculiarly suited for "God's acre" as that surrounding God's
temple?

A residence of dearly four years' duration at the parsonage had
rendered this quiet churchyard a favourite retreat with Regina, and,
divesting the graves of all superstitious terrors, had awakened in
her nature only a most profound and loving reverence for the
precincts of the