amid
the golden glare of the June sunlight was a wavering blur which at
intervals seemed to adhere to a grey cross, and to make it give forth a
succession of soft creaks.

Presently, however--against my wish, indeed--that wavering blur
resolved itself into a little, elderly man. Sharp-featured, with a
thick, silvery tuft of hair beneath his under lip, and a bushy white
moustache curled in military fashion, on his upper, he was using the
cross as a means of support as, with his disengaged hand outstretched,
and sawing the air, he dug his foot repeatedly into the ground, and, as
he did so, bestowed upon me sundry dry, covert glances from the depths
of a pair of dark eyes.

"What have you got there?" I inquired.

"A snake," he replied in an educated bass voice, and with a rugged
forefinger he pointed downwards; whereupon I perceived that wriggling
on the path at his feet and convulsively whisking its tail, there was
an echidna.

"Oh, it is only a grassworm," I said vexedly.

The old man pushed away the dull, iridescent, rope-like thing with the
toe of his boot, raised a straw hat in salute, and strode firmly
onwards.

"I thank you," I called out; whereupon, he replied without looking
behind him:

"If the thing really WAS a grassworm, of course there was no danger."

Then he disappeared among the tombstones.

Looking at the sky, I perceived the time to be about five o'clock.

The steppe wind was sighing over the tombs, and causing long stems of
grass to rock to and fro, and freighting the heated air with the silken
rustling of birches and limes and other trees, and leading one to
detect amid the humming of summer a note of quiet grief eminently
calculated to evoke lofty, direct thoughts concerning life and one's
fellow-men.

Veiling with greenery, grey and white tombstones worn with the snows of
winter, crosses streaked with marks of rain, and the wall with which
the graveyard was encircled, the rank vegetation served to also conceal
the propinquity of a slovenly, clamorous town which lay coated with
rich, sooty grime amid an atmosphere of dust and smells.

As I set off for a ramble among the tombs and tangled grass, I could
discern through openings in the curtain of verdure a belfry's gilded
cross which reared itself solemnly over crosses and memorials. At the
foot of those memorials the sacramental vestment of the cemetery was
studded with a kaleidoscopic sheen of flowers over which bees and wasps
were