learnt her easy
task. Already impressed, beyond all telling, by the silent building
and the peaceful beauty of the spot in which it stood--majestic age
surrounded by perpetual youth--it seemed to her, when she heard these
things, sacred to all goodness and virtue. It was another world, where
sin and sorrow never came; a tranquil place of rest, where nothing evil
entered.

When the bachelor had given her in connection with almost every tomb
and flat grave-stone some history of its own, he took her down into the
old crypt, now a mere dull vault, and showed her how it had been
lighted up in the time of the monks, and how, amid lamps depending from
the roof, and swinging censers exhaling scented odours, and habits
glittering with gold and silver, and pictures, and precious stuffs, and
jewels all flashing and glistening through the low arches, the chaunt
of aged voices had been many a time heard there, at midnight, in old
days, while hooded figures knelt and prayed around, and told their
rosaries of beads. Thence, he took her above ground again, and showed
her, high up in the old walls, small galleries, where the nuns had been
wont to glide along--dimly seen in their dark dresses so far off--or
to pause like gloomy shadows, listening to the prayers. He showed her
too, how the warriors, whose figures rested on the tombs, had worn
those rotting scraps of armour up above--how this had been a helmet,
and that a shield, and that a gauntlet--and how they had wielded the
great two-handed swords, and beaten men down, with yonder iron mace.
All that he told the child she treasured in her mind; and sometimes,
when she awoke at night from dreams of those old times, and rising from
her bed looked out at the dark church, she almost hoped to see the
windows lighted up, and hear the organ's swell, and sound of voices, on
the rushing wind.

The old sexton soon got better, and was about again. From him the
child learnt many other things, though of a different kind. He was not
able to work, but one day there was a grave to be made, and he came to
overlook the man who dug it. He was in a talkative mood; and the
child, at first standing by his side, and afterwards sitting on the
grass at his feet, with her thoughtful face raised towards his, began
to converse with him.

Now, the man who did the sexton's duty was a little older than he,
though much more active. But he was deaf; and when the sexton (who
peradventure, on a pinch, might