irst, one sleek bird, hovering near his ragged house as it swung
and dangled in the wind, uttered his hoarse cry, quite by chance as it
would seem, and in a sober tone as though he were but talking to
himself. Another answered, and he called again, but louder than
before; then another spoke and then another; and each time the first,
aggravated by contradiction, insisted on his case more strongly. Other
voices, silent till now, struck in from boughs lower down and higher up
and midway, and to the right and left, and from the tree-tops; and
others, arriving hastily from the grey church turrets and old belfry
window, joined the clamour which rose and fell, and swelled and dropped
again, and still went on; and all this noisy contention amidst a
skimming to and fro, and lighting on fresh branches, and frequent
change of place, which satirised the old restlessness of those who lay
so still beneath the moss and turf below, and the strife in which they
had worn away their lives.

Frequently raising her eyes to the trees whence these sounds came down,
and feeling as though they made the place more quiet than perfect
silence would have done, the child loitered from grave to grave, now
stopping to replace with careful hands the bramble which had started
from some green mound it helped to keep in shape, and now peeping
through one of the low latticed windows into the church, with its
worm-eaten books upon the desks, and baize of whitened-green mouldering
from the pew sides and leaving the naked wood to view. There were the
seats where the poor old people sat, worn spare, and yellow like
themselves; the rugged font where children had their names, the homely
altar where they knelt in after life, the plain black tressels that
bore their weight on their last visit to the cool old shady church.
Everything told of long use and quiet slow decay; the very bell-rope in
the porch was frayed into a fringe, and hoary with old age.

She was looking at a humble stone which told of a young man who had
died at twenty-three years old, fifty-five years ago, when she heard a
faltering step approaching, and looking round saw a feeble woman bent
with the weight of years, who tottered to the foot of that same grave
and asked her to read the writing on the stone. The old woman thanked
her when she had done, saying that she had had the words by heart for
many a long, long year, but could not see them now.

'Were you his mother?' said the child.

'