soothed and shared them! No,--
there is no such dreary lie as that which prates of consoling Time! You
who are gone, if in heaven you know how we mortals fare, you know that
life took from you no love, no faith,--that bitterer tears fall for you
to-day than ever wet your new graves,--that the gayer words and the
recalled smiles are only like the flowers that grow above you, symbols
of the deeper roots we strike in your past existence,--that to the
true soul there is no such thing as forgetfulness, no such mercy as
diminishing regret!

Slowly the long procession wound up the river,--here, black with plumed
hearse and sable mourners,--there, gay with regimental band and bright
uniforms,--no stately, proper funeral, ordered by custom and marshalled
by propriety, but a straggling array of vehicles: here, the doctor's old
chaise,--there, an open wagon, a dusty buggy, a long, open omnibus,
such as the village-stable kept for pleasure-parties or for parties of
mourning who wanted to go _en masse_.

All that knew Frank, in or about Ridgefield, and all who had sons or
brothers in the army, swarmed to do him honor; and the quaint, homely
array crept slowly through the valley, to the sound of tolling bell and
moaning wind and the low rush of the swollen river,--the first taste
of war's desolation that had fallen upon us, the first dark wave of a
whelming tide!

As it passed out of sight, I heard the wheels cease, one by one, their
crunch and grind on the gravelled road up the slope of the grave-yard.
I knew they had reached that hill-side where the dead of Ridgefield
lie calmer than its living; and presently the long-drawn notes of that
hymn-tune consecrated to such occasions--old China--rose and fell in
despairing cadences on my ear. If ever any music was invented for the
express purpose of making mourners as distracted as any external thing
can make them, it is the bitter, hopeless, unrestrained wail of this
tune. There is neither peace nor resignation in it, but the very
exhaustion of raving sorrow that heeds neither God nor man, but
cries out, with the soulless agony of a wind-harp, its refusal to be
comforted.

At length it was over, and still in that same dead calm Josephine came
home to me. Mrs. Bowen was frightened, Mr. Bowen distressed. I could not
think what to do, at first; but remembering how sometimes a little thing
had utterly broken me down from a regained calmness after loss, some
homely association, some reca