making it look
like a garden!

Presently we stepped over to the churchyard. We should not have been
human if we had not advanced with a Hamlet-Horatio air: "Has this fellow
no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?" We found our
four friends in a space of the churchyard from which the tombstones had
been temporarily removed, engaged, not with mattock and death's head, but
with spirit-level and measuring-cord. They were levelling a stretch of
newly-turned and smoothed ground, and they pointed with pride to the
portion of the work already accomplished, serried rows of spick-and-span
headstones, all "plumb," as they explained, and freshly scraped--not a
sign of caressing moss or a tendril of vine to be seen. A neat job, if
there ever was one. We should have seen the yard before they had taken it
in hand! There wasn't a stone that was straight, and the weeds and the
brambles--well, look at it now. We looked. Could anything be more refined
or in more perfect taste? The churchyard was as smooth and correct as a
newly-barbered head, not a hair out of place. We looked and kept our
thoughts to ourselves, but we wondered if the dead were really as
grateful as they should be for this drastic house-cleaning? Did they
appreciate this mathematical uniformity, this spruce and spotless
residential air of their numbered rectangular rest; or was not the old
way nearer to their desire, with soft mosses tucking them in from the
garish sun, and Spring winds spreading coverlets of wild flowers above
their sleep?

But--who knows?--perhaps the dead prefer to be up-to-date, and to follow
the fashion in funeral furnishings; and surely such expert necropolitans
as our four friends ought to know. No doubt the Sheldon Center dead would
have the same tastes as the Sheldon Center living; for, after all, we
forget, in our idealization of them, that the dead, like the living, are
a vast _bourgeoisie_. Yes! it is a depressing thought--the _bourgeoisie_
of the dead!

As we stood talking, the young priest of the parish joined our group. He
was a German, from Duesseldorf, and his worn face lit up when he found
that Colin had been at Duesseldorf and could talk with him about it. As
he stood with us there on that bleak upland, he seemed a pathetic,
symbolic figure, lonely standard-bearer of the spirit in one of the
dreary colonies of that indomitable church that carries her mystic
sacraments even into the waste places and borders of the w