reaking _diligence_ became an
absurdity. Brittany was the fashion for three months of the year, and
wherever there is fashion there is at least one railway. The one built
to satisfy the thousands who wished to visit the wild, sad beauties of
the west of France was laid along the road beside the little cemetery
of this tale.

It takes a long while to awaken the dead. These heard neither the
voluble working-men nor even the first snort of the engine. And, of
course, they neither heard nor knew of the pleadings of the old priest
that the line should be laid elsewhere. One night he came out into the
old cemetery and sat on a grave and wept. For he loved his dead and felt
it to be a tragic pity that the greed of money, and the fever of travel,
and the petty ambitions of men whose place was in the great cities where
such ambitions were born, should shatter forever the holy calm of those
who had suffered so much on earth. He had known many of them in life,
for he was very old; and although he believed, like all good Catholics,
in heaven and purgatory and hell, yet he always saw his friends as he
had buried them, peacefully asleep in their coffins, the souls lying
with folded hands like the bodies that held them, patiently awaiting the
final call. He would never have told you, this good old priest, that he
believed heaven to be a great echoing palace in which God and the
archangels dwelt alone waiting for that great day when the elected dead
should rise and enter the Presence together, for he was a simple old man
who had read and thought little; but he had a zigzag of fancy in his
humble mind, and he saw his friends and his ancestors' friends as I have
related to you, soul and body in the deep undreaming sleep of death, but
sleep, not a rotted body deserted by its affrighted mate; and to all who
sleep there comes, sooner or later, the time of awakening.

He knew that they had slept through the wild storms that rage on the
coast of Finisterre, when ships are flung on the rocks and trees crash
down in the Bois d'Amour. He knew that the soft, slow chantings of the
_pardon_ never struck a chord in those frozen memories, meagre and
monotonous as their store had been; nor the bagpipes down in the open
village hall--a mere roof on poles--when the bride and her friends
danced for three days without a smile on their sad brown faces.

All this the dead had known in life and it could not disturb nor
interest them now. But that hideous i