ver my world.

That afternoon I found something I had never seen before--a little grave
alone in a wide pasture which had once been a field. The nearest house
was at least two miles away, but by hunting for it I found a very old
cellar, where the child's home used to be, not very far off, along the
slope. It must have been a great many years ago that the house had stood
there; and the small slate head-stone was worn away by the rain and
wind, so there was nothing to be read, if indeed there had ever been any
letters on it. It had looked many a storm in the face, and many a red
sunset. I suppose the woods near by had grown and been cut, and grown
again, since it was put there. There was an old sweet-brier bush growing
on the short little grave, and in the grass underneath I found a
ground-sparrow's nest. It was like a little neighborhood, and I have
felt ever since as if I belonged to it; and I wondered then if one of
the young ground-sparrows was not always sent to take the nest when the
old ones were done with it, so they came back in the spring year after
year to live there, and there were always the stone and the sweet-brier
bush and the birds to remember the child. It was such a lonely place in
that wide field under the great sky, and yet it was so comfortable too;
but the sight of the little grave at first touched me strangely, and I
tried to picture to myself the procession that came out from the house
the day of the funeral, and I thought of the mother in the evening after
all the people had gone home, and how she missed the baby, and kept
seeing the new grave out here in the twilight as she went about her
work. I suppose the family moved away, and so all the rest were buried
elsewhere.

I often think of this place, and I link it in my thoughts with something
I saw once in the water when I was out at sea: a little boat that some
child had lost, that had drifted down the river and out to sea; too long
a voyage, for it was a sad little wreck, with even its white sail of a
hand-breadth half under water, and its twine rigging trailing astern. It
was a silly little boat, and no loss, except to its owner, to whom it
had seemed as brave and proud a thing as any ship of the line to you and
me. It was a shipwreck of his small hopes, I suppose, and I can see it
now, the toy of the great winds and waves, as it floated on its way,
while I sailed on mine, out of sight of land.

The little grave is forgotten by everybody but