e also raised, or
altar-tombs, some of which have armorial bearings on them. One clergyman
has caused himself and his wife to be buried right in the middle of the
stone-bordered path that traverses the church-yard; so that not an
individual of the thousands who pass along this public way can help
trampling over him or her. The scene, nevertheless, was very cheerful in
the morning sun: people going about their business in the day's primal
freshness, which was just as fresh here as in younger villages; children,
with milk-pails, loitering over the burial-stones; school-boys playing
leap-frog with the altar-tombs; the simple old town preparing itself for
the day, which would be like myriads of other days that had passed over
it, but yet would be worth living through. And down on the church-yard,
where were buried many generations whom it remembered in their time,
looked the stately tower of Saint Botolph; and it was good to see and
think of such an age-long giant, intermarrying the present epoch with a
distant past, and getting quite imbued with human nature by being so
immemorially connected with men's familiar knowledge and homely interests.
It is a noble tower; and the jackdaws evidently have pleasant homes in
their hereditary nests among its topmost windows, and live delightful
lives, flitting and cawing about its pinnacles and flying-buttresses. I
should almost like to be a jackdaw myself, for the sake of living up
there.

In front of the church, not more than twenty yards off, and with a low
brick wall between, flows the River Witham. On the hither bank a fisherman
was washing his boat; and another skiff, with her sail lazily
half-twisted, lay on the opposite strand. The stream, at this point, is
about of such width, that, if the tall tower were to tumble over flat on
its face, its top-stone might perhaps reach to the middle of the channel.
On the farther shore there is a line of antique-looking houses, with roofs
of red tile, and windows opening out of them,--some of these dwellings
being so ancient, that the Reverend Mr. Cotton, subsequently our first
Boston minister, must have seen them with his own bodily eyes, when he
used to issue from the front-portal after service. Indeed, there must be
very many houses here, and even some streets, that bear much the aspect
that they did when the Puritan divine paced solemnly among them.

In our rambles about town, we went into a bookseller's shop to inquire if
he had any de