a funeral cortege.

The road along which it traveled was no longer a deeply scarred trail,
rutted through its clay surface by the hauling of lumber. It was metaled
and smooth. There were many changes in the character of things
hereabouts--all changes which attested that the curse of decay and
hopeless sterility had been lifted. Off through a rift in the hills
loomed the white concrete abutment of an aqueduct--and through the
valley wound a railroad. A man might have walked many miles and come
upon few deserted habitations, preyed upon by the twin vandals Time and
Decay and staring blankly out through unglazed windows. What had once
been a land of abandoned farms, a battle-ground where poverty had fought
and defeated humanity, was now a land redeemed. Honest thrift and
substantial comfort had crowned it with reclamation.

The church to which the hearse was making its way had also changed in
aspect. The tumbledown building had become a more worthy house of
worship, unelaborate, but renewed. Its belfry stood upright and on the
Sabbath spoke out in the music of its chimes. Graves where once the
headstones had teetered in neglect lay now in rows of ordered care, and
those who slept in them no longer slept among the briars of over-grown
thickets.

About the building, waiting for the coming of a new tenant in the acre
of the dead, were gathered a score or more of neighbors, because the
body which was to be laid to rest today had been, in life, the member of
a family which they delighted to honor and respect.

Along the stone wall which skirted the road, and under the wild apple
trees, were hitched the wagons and buggies that had brought them from
many miles around, across the hills. Some of them came from houses far
back where roads narrowed and grew precipitous.

Yet even among those who stood waiting in the churchyard near the
reminder of an open grave, the lyric tunefulness of this June morning
refused to surrender unconditionally to sadness. Off between the fence
and the rising slope of the nearest hill a ripple ran across a yellow
field of buckwheat and from a fence-post a golden-breasted lark sang
merrily.

Those who had arrived earliest gossiped of such commonplace matters as
make the round of life where small things take the place of large
excitement, and their faces were not gloomy faces. Young men and girls
among them were strolling apart, and the smiles in their eyes told that
to them death was an incident,