thy turn comes, lass, I'll do by
thee as thou'd be done by."'

'And how would you be done by?' asked the minister.

'Well, it's i' this way, Mr. Penrose,' said the old woman. 'I want
a dry grave, wi' a posy growin' on th' top. I somehaa like posies
on graves; they mak' me think of th' owd hymn,

'"There everlastin' spring abides,
And never-witherin' flaars."'

Now, Mr. Penrose was one of the so-called theological young
bloods, and held little sympathy with Dr. Watts's sensuous views
of a future state. His common-sense, however, and his discretion
came to his rescue, and delivered him from a strong temptation to
blast the old woman's paradise with a breath of negative
criticism.

'There's a grave daan at th' bottom o' th' yard, Mr. Penrose,
where th' sunleet rests from morn till neet, an' I've axed Joseph
to lay me there, for it's welly awlus warm, and flaars grow from
Kesmas to Kesmas. Th' doctor's little lass lies there. Yo never
knowd her, Mr. Penrose. Hoo were some pratty, bless her! Did yo'
ever read what her faither put o'er th' top o' th' stone?'

Mr. Penrose confessed he was in ignorance of the epitaph over the
grave of the doctor's child. As yet the history and romance of the
graveyard were unknown to him.

'Well, it's this,' continued his informant:

'"Such lilies th' angels gather for th' garden of God."

They'll never write that o'er me, Mr. Penrose. I'm nobbud a
withered stalk. Hoo were eight--I'm eighty. But for all that I
should like a flaar on mi grave, and Joseph says I shall hev one.'

* * * * *

The autumn gave place to a long and cheerless winter, which all
too slowly yielded to a late and nipping spring. The wild March
wind swept across the moors, roaring loudly around the old
conventicle, chasing the last year's leaves in a mad whirl among
the rows of headstones, and hissing, as though in anger, through
the rank grasses growing on the innumerable mounds that marked the
underlying dead, and then careering off, as though wrathful at its
powerlessness to disturb the sleepers, to distant farmsteads and
lone folds where starved ewes cowered with their early lambs under
shivering thorns, and old men complained of the blast that roused
the slumbering rheum and played havoc with their feeble frames.
Scanty snow showers fell late under 'the roaring moon of
daffodil,' whitening the moorlands and lying glistening in the
morning light, to be gathere