ome issuing on
a scroll from angels' trumpets--on the emblematic horrors, the figures
rising headless from the grave, and all the traditional ingenuities in
which it pleased our fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and
their sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort of mirth.
Each ornament may have been executed by the merriest apprentice,
whistling as he plied the mallet; but the original meaning of each, and
the combined effect of so many of them in this quiet enclosure, is
serious to the point of melancholy.

Round a great part of the circuit, houses of a low class present their
backs to the churchyard. Only a few inches separate the living from the
dead. Here, a window is partly blocked up by the pediment of a tomb;
there, where the street falls far below the level of the graves, a
chimney has been trained up the back of a monument, and a red pot looks
vulgarly over from behind. A damp smell of the graveyard finds its way
into houses where workmen sit at meat. Domestic life on a small scale
goes forward visibly at the windows. The very solitude and stillness of
the enclosure, which lies apart from the town's traffic, serves to
accentuate the contrast. As you walk upon the graves, you see children
scattering crumbs to feed the sparrows; you hear people singing or
washing dishes, or the sound of tears and castigation; the linen on a
clothes-pole flaps against funereal sculpture; or perhaps the cat slips
over the lintel and descends on a memorial urn. And as there is nothing
else astir, these incongruous sights and noises take hold on the
attention and exaggerate the sadness of the place.

Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats. I have seen one afternoon, as
many as thirteen of them seated on the grass beside old Milne, the
Master Builder, all sleek and fat, and complacently blinking, as if they
had fed upon strange meats. Old Milne was chanting with the saints, as
we may hope, and cared little for the company about his grave; but I
confess the spectacle had an ugly side for me; and I was glad to step
forward and raise my eyes to where the Castle and the roofs of the Old
Town, and the spire of the Assembly Hall, stood deployed against the sky
with the colourless precision of engraving. An open outlook is to be
desired from a churchyard, and a sight of the sky and some of the
world's beauty relieves a mind from morbid thoughts.

I shall never forget one visit. It was a grey, dropping day; t