d fed the green moss in the letters of the
epitaphs. Over all the sun was shining, as if everywhere and forever
spring was the order of things. And is it not so? Is not the idea of the
creation an eternal spring ever trembling on the verge of summer? It
seemed so to the curate, who was not given to sad, still less to
sentimental moralizing over the graves. From such moods his heart
recoiled. To him they were weak and mawkish, and in him they would have
been treacherous. No grave was to him the place where a friend was
lying; it was but a cenotaph--the place where the Lord had lain.

"Let those possessed with demons haunt the tombs," he said, as he sat
down in the pulpit; "for me, I will turn my back upon them with the
risen Christ. Yes, friend, I hear you! I know what you say! You have
more affection than I? you can not forsake the last resting-place of the
beloved? Well, you may have more feeling than I; there is no gauge by
which I can tell, and if there were, it would be useless: we are as God
made us.--No, I will not say that: I will say rather, I am as God is
making me, and I shall one day be as He has made me. Meantime I know
that He will have me love my enemy tenfold more than now I love my
friend. Thou believest that the malefactor--ah, there was faith now! Of
two men dying together in agony and shame, the one beseeches of the
other the grace of a king! Thou believest, I say--at least thou
professest to believe that the malefactor was that very day with Jesus
in Paradise, and yet thou broodest over thy friend's grave, gathering
thy thoughts about the pitiful garment he left behind him, and letting
himself drift away into the unknown, forsaken of all but thy vaguest,
most shapeless thinkings! Tell me not thou fearest to enter there whence
has issued no revealing. It is God who gives thee thy mirror of
imagination, and if thou keep it clean, it will give thee back no shadow
but of the truth. Never a cry of love went forth from human heart but
it found some heavenly chord to fold it in. Be sure thy friend inhabits
a day not out of harmony with this morning of earthly spring, with this
sunlight, those rain-drops, that sweet wind that flows so softly over
his grave."

It was the first sprouting of a _germon_. He covered it up and left it:
he had something else to talk to his people about this morning.

While he sat thus in the pulpit, his wife was praying for him ere she
rose. She had not learned to love him in the