to me. You have a good face; if you can,
stop with my child, and give her your love and care. And now, may God
have mercy on my soul!"

Then came a minute's silence, broken only by the stifled sobs of those
who stood around, till a ray of light from the rising sun struggled
through the grey mist of the morning, and, touching the heads of
mother and child, illumined them as with a glory. It passed as quickly
as it came, drawing away with it the mother's life. Suddenly, as it
faded, she spread out her arms, sighed, and smiled. When the doctor
reached the bed, her story was told: she had fallen asleep.

Death had been very gentle with her.

CHAPTER XIII

Go, my reader, if the day is dull, and you feel inclined to moralize--
for whatever may be said to the contrary, there are less useful
occupations--and look at your village churchyard. What do you see
before you? A plot of enclosed ground backed by a grey old church, a
number of tombstones more or less decrepit, and a great quantity of
little oblong mounds covered with rank grass. If you have any
imagination, any power of thought, you will see more than that. First,
with the instinctive selfishness of human nature, you will recognize
your own future habitation; perhaps your eye will mark the identical
spot where the body you love must lie through all seasons and
weathers, through the slow centuries that will flit so fast for you,
till the crash of doom. It is good that you should think of that,
although it makes you shudder. The English churchyard takes the place
of the Egyptian mummy at the feast, or the slave in the Roman
conqueror's car--it mocks your vigour, and whispers of the end of
beauty and strength.

Probably you need some such reminder. But if, giving to the inevitable
the sigh that is its due, you pursue the vein of thought, it may
further occur to you that the plot before you is in a sense a summary
of the aspirations of humanity. It marks the realization of human
hopes, it is the crown of human ambitions, the grave of human
failures. Here, too, is the end of the man, and here the birthplace of
the angel or the demon. It is his sure inheritance, one that he never
solicits and never squanders; and, last, it is the only certain
resting-place of sleepless, tired mortality.

Here it was that they brought Hilda, and the old squire, and laid them
side by side against the coffin of yeoman Caresfoot, whose fancy it
had been to