east, if I had been in the customary public room of
the modern hotel, with all its disproportions and discomforts, my ears
would have been dull, and there would have been some ugly temper or
other uppermost in my spirit, and so they would have wasted their songs
upon an unworthy hearer.

Next morning I went along to visit the church. It is a long-backed
red-and-white building, very much restored, and stands in a pleasant
graveyard among those great trees of which I have spoken already. The
sky was drowned in a mist. Now and again pulses of cold wind went about
the enclosure, and set the branches busy overhead, and the dead leaves
scurrying in to the angles of the church buttresses. Now and again,
also, I could hear the dull sudden fall of a chestnut among the
grass--the dog would bark before the rectory door--or there would come a
clinking of pails from the stable-yard behind. But in spite of these
occasional interruptions--in spite, also, of the continuous autumn
twittering that filled the trees--the chief impression somehow was one
as of utter silence, inasmuch that the little greenish bell that peeped
out of a window in the tower disquieted me with a sense of some possible
and more inharmonious disturbance. The grass was wet, as if with a
hoar-frost that had just been melted. I do not know that ever I saw a
morning more autumnal. As I went to and fro among the graves, I saw some
flowers set reverently before a recently erected tomb, and drawing near
was almost startled to find they lay on the grave of a man seventy-two
years old when he died. We are accustomed to strew flowers only over the
young, where love has been cut short untimely, and great possibilities
have been restrained by death. We strew them there in token that these
possibilities, in some deeper sense, shall yet be realised, and the
touch of our dead loves remain with us and guide us to the end. And yet
there was more significance, perhaps, and perhaps a greater consolation,
in this little nosegay on the grave of one who had died old. We are apt
to make so much of the tragedy of death, and think so little of the
enduring tragedy of some men's lives, that we see more to lament for in
a life cut off in the midst of usefulness and love, than in one that
miserably survives all love and usefulness, and goes about the world the
phantom of itself, without hope, or joy, or any consolation. These
flowers seemed not so much the token of love that survived death, a