of one who is now coming to his final rest.

There are two graves near the old yew tree; and the grass has overgrown
them. A third is close by; and the dark earth at each side has just been
thrown up. The bearers come; with a heavy pace they move along; the
coffin heaveth up and down, as they step over the intervening graves.

Grief and old age had seized upon the father, and worn out his life; and
premature decay soon seized upon the son, and gnawed away his vain
ambition, and his useless strength, till he prayed to be borne, not the
way yonder that was most opposite to his father and his mother, but even
the same way they had gone--the way which leads to the Old Church-yard
Tree.

THE ENGLISH PEASANT.

BY HOWITT.

The English peasant is generally reckoned a very simple, monotonous
animal; and most people, when they have called him a clown, or a
country-hob, think they have described him. If you see a picture of him,
he is a long, silly-looking fellow, in a straw hat, a white slop, and a
pair of ankle-boots, with a bill in his hand--just as the London artist
sees him in the juxta-metropolitan districts; and that is the English
peasant. They who have gone farther into England, however, than Surrey,
Kent, or Middlesex, have seen the English peasant in some different
costume, under a good many different aspects; and they who will take the
trouble to recollect what they have heard of him, will find him a rather
multifarious creature. He is, in truth, a very Protean personage. What
is he, in fact? A day-laborer, a woodman, a plowman, a wagoner, a
collier, a worker in railroad and canal making, a gamekeeper, a poacher,
an incendiary, a charcoal-burner, a keeper of village ale-houses, and
Tom-and-Jerrys; a tramp, a pauper, pacing sullenly in the court-yard of
a parish-union, or working in his frieze jacket on some parish-farm; a
boatman, a road-side stone-breaker, a quarryman, a journeyman
bricklayer, or his clerk; a shepherd, a drover, a rat-catcher, a
mole-catcher, and a hundred other things; in any one of which, he is as
different from the sheepish, straw-hatted, and ankle-booted,
bill-holding fellow of the print-shop windows, as a cockney is from a
Newcastle keelman.

In the matter of costume only, every different district presents him in
a different shape. In the counties round London, eastward and westward,
through Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire, etc., he is the _white-slopped_
man of the London prints,