e of Eliot's pulpit, and that on the rugged front of
the rock the name by which we familiarly knew her, Zenobia,--and not
another word, should be deeply cut, and left for the moss and lichens
to fill up at their long leisure. But Hollingsworth (to whose ideas on
this point great deference was due) made it his request that her grave
might be dug on the gently sloping hillside, in the wide pasture,
where, as we once supposed, Zenobia and he had planned to build their
cottage. And thus it was done, accordingly.

She was buried very much as other people have been for hundreds of
years gone by. In anticipation of a death, we Blithedale colonists had
sometimes set our fancies at work to arrange a funereal ceremony, which
should be the proper symbolic expression of our spiritual faith and
eternal hopes; and this we meant to substitute for those customary
rites which were moulded originally out of the Gothic gloom, and by
long use, like an old velvet pall, have so much more than their first
death-smell in them. But when the occasion came we found it the
simplest and truest thing, after all, to content ourselves with the old
fashion, taking away what we could, but interpolating no novelties, and
particularly avoiding all frippery of flowers and cheerful emblems.
The procession moved from the farmhouse. Nearest the dead walked an
old man in deep mourning, his face mostly concealed in a white
handkerchief, and with Priscilla leaning on his arm. Hollingsworth and
myself came next. We all stood around the narrow niche in the cold
earth; all saw the coffin lowered in; all heard the rattle of the
crumbly soil upon its lid,--that final sound, which mortality awakens
on the utmost verge of sense, as if in the vain hope of bringing an
echo from the spiritual world.

I noticed a stranger,--a stranger to most of those present, though
known to me,--who, after the coffin had descended, took up a handful of
earth and flung it first into the grave. I had given up
Hollingsworth's arm, and now found myself near this man.

"It was an idle thing--a foolish thing--for Zenobia to do," said he.
"She was the last woman in the world to whom death could have been
necessary. It was too absurd! I have no patience with her."

"Why so?" I inquired, smothering my horror at his cold comment, in my
eager curiosity to discover some tangible truth as to his relation with
Zenobia. "If any crisis could justify the sad wrong she offered to
herself,