is breaking and
the ordinary life of men is beginning to bestir itself among the
streets.

In the middle of it all I fell asleep, to be wakened by the officious
knocking at my door, and I find myself twelve years older than I had
dreamed myself all night.

FOOTNOTE:

[33] See a short essay of De Quincey's.

III

THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES

It is all very well to talk of death as "a pleasant potion of
immortality"; but the most of us, I suspect, are of "queasy stomachs,"
and find it none of the sweetest.[34] The graveyard may be cloak-room to
Heaven; but we must admit that it is a very ugly and offensive vestibule
in itself, however fair may be the life to which it leads. And though
Enoch and Elias went into the temple through a gate which certainly may
be called Beautiful, the rest of us have to find our way to it through
Ezekiel's low-bowed door and the vault full of creeping things and all
manner of abominable beasts. Nevertheless, there is a certain frame of
mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an
alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else. It was
in obedience to this wise regulation that the other morning found me
lighting my pipe at the entrance to Old Greyfriars', thoroughly sick of
the town, the country, and myself.

Two of the men were talking at the gate, one of them carrying a spade in
hands still crusted with the soil of graves. Their very aspect was
delightful to me; and I crept nearer to them, thinking to pick up some
snatch of sexton gossip, some "talk fit for a charnel,"[35] something,
in fine, worthy of that fastidious logician, that adept in coroner's
law, who has come down to us as the patron of Yaughan's liquor, and the
very prince of gravediggers. Scots people in general are so much wrapped
up in their profession that I had a good chance of overhearing such
conversation: the talk of fishmongers running usually on stockfish and
haddocks; while of the Scots sexton I could repeat stories and speeches
that positively smell of the graveyard. But on this occasion I was
doomed to disappointment. My two friends were far into the region of
generalities. Their profession was forgotten in their electorship.
Politics had engulfed the narrower economy of gravedigging. "Na, na,"
said the one, "ye're a' wrang." "The English and Irish Churches,"
answered the other, in a tone as if he had made the remark before, and
it had been called in question--"The En