said;
but it filled me with a strange emotion to listen to the old man,
and to watch how the color rose in his cheeks as he spoke of the
days of their courtship, of how beautiful she was, and how many little
tricks he had been guilty of, that he might meet her. And then he
talked of his wedding-day; and his eyes brightened, and he seemed to
be carried back, by his words, to that joyful time. And yet there
she was, lying in the next room, dead--an old woman, and he was an old
man, speaking of the days of hope, long passed away. Ah, well, so it
is; then I was but a child, and now I am old, as old as Preben Schwane
then was. Time passes away, and all things changed. I can remember
quite well the day on which she was buried, and how Old Preben
walked close behind the coffin.

"A few years before this time the old couple had had their
grave-stone prepared, with an inscription and their names, but not the
date. In the evening the stone was taken to the churchyard, and laid
on the grave. A year later it was taken up, that Old Preben might be
laid by the side of his wife. They did not leave behind them wealth,
they left behind them far less than people had believed they
possessed; what there was went to families distantly related to
them, of whom, till then, no one had ever heard. The old house, with
its balcony of wickerwork, and the bench at the top of the high steps,
under the lime-tree, was considered, by the road-inspectors, too old
and rotten to be left standing. Afterwards, when the same fate
befell the convent church, and the graveyard was destroyed, the
grave-stone of Preben and Martha, like everything else, was sold to
whoever would buy it. And so it happened that this stone was not cut
in two as many others had been, but now lies in the courtyard below, a
scouring block for the maids, and a playground for the children. The
paved street now passes over the resting place of Old Preben and his
wife; no one thinks of them any more now."

And the old man who had spoken of all this shook his head
mournfully, and said, "Forgotten! Ah, yes, everything will be
forgotten!" And then the conversation turned on other matters.

But the youngest child in the room, a boy, with large, earnest
eyes, mounted upon a chair behind the window curtains, and looked
out into the yard, where the moon was pouring a flood of light on
the old gravestone,--the stone that had always appeared to him so dull
and flat, but which lay there now like