e jewelled [191] branches of the dwarf rose-bushes in
flower. And therewith came, full-grown, never wholly to leave him,
with the certainty that even children do sometimes die, the physical
horror of death, with its wholly selfish recoil from the association of
lower forms of life, and the suffocating weight above. No benign,
grave figure in beautiful soldier's things any longer abroad in the
world for his protection! only a few poor, piteous bones; and above
them, possibly, a certain sort of figure he hoped not to see. For
sitting one day in the garden below an open window, he heard people
talking, and could not but listen, how, in a sleepless hour, a sick
woman had seen one of the dead sitting beside her, come to call her
hence; and from the broken talk evolved with much clearness the notion
that not all those dead people had really departed to the churchyard,
nor were quite so motionless as they looked, but led a secret,
half-fugitive life in their old homes, quite free by night, though
sometimes visible in the day, dodging from room to room, with no great
goodwill towards those who shared the place with them. All night the
figure sat beside him in the reveries of his broken sleep, and was not
quite gone in the morning--an odd, irreconcileable new member of the
household, making the sweet familiar chambers unfriendly and suspect by
its uncertain presence. He could have hated the dead he had pitied so,
for being [192] thus. Afterwards he came to think of those poor,
home-returning ghosts, which all men have fancied to themselves--the
revenants--pathetically, as crying, or beating with vain hands at the
doors, as the wind came, their cries distinguishable in it as a wilder
inner note. But, always making death more unfamiliar still, that old
experience would ever, from time to time, return to him; even in the
living he sometimes caught its likeness; at any time or place, in a
moment, the faint atmosphere of the chamber of death would be breathed
around him, and the image with the bound chin, the quaint smile, the
straight, stiff feet, shed itself across the air upon the bright
carpet, amid the gayest company, or happiest communing with himself.

To most children the sombre questionings to which impressions like
these attach themselves, if they come at all, are actually suggested by
religious books, which therefore they often regard with much secret
distaste, and dismiss, as far as possible, from their habitual tho