sexton, 'that she,' he
pointed to the grave, 'must have been a deal older than you or me.'

'Seventy-nine,' answered the old man with a shake of the head, 'I tell
you that I saw it.'

'Saw it?' replied the sexton; 'aye, but, Davy, women don't always tell
the truth about their age.'

'That's true indeed,' said the other old man, with a sudden sparkle in
his eye. 'She might have been older.'

'I'm sure she must have been. Why, only think how old she looked. You
and I seemed but boys to her.'

'She did look old,' rejoined David. 'You're right. She did look old.'

'Call to mind how old she looked for many a long, long year, and say if
she could be but seventy-nine at last--only our age,' said the sexton.

'Five year older at the very least!' cried the other.

'Five!' retorted the sexton. 'Ten. Good eighty-nine. I call to mind
the time her daughter died. She was eighty-nine if she was a day, and
tries to pass upon us now, for ten year younger. Oh! human vanity!'

The other old man was not behindhand with some moral reflections on
this fruitful theme, and both adduced a mass of evidence, of such
weight as to render it doubtful--not whether the deceased was of the
age suggested, but whether she had not almost reached the patriarchal
term of a hundred. When they had settled this question to their mutual
satisfaction, the sexton, with his friend's assistance, rose to go.

'It's chilly, sitting here, and I must be careful--till the summer,' he
said, as he prepared to limp away.

'What?' asked old David.

'He's very deaf, poor fellow!' cried the sexton. 'Good-bye!' 'Ah!'
said old David, looking after him. 'He's failing very fast. He ages
every day.'

And so they parted; each persuaded that the other had less life in him
than himself; and both greatly consoled and comforted by the little
fiction they had agreed upon, respecting Becky Morgan, whose decease
was no longer a precedent of uncomfortable application, and would be no
business of theirs for half a score of years to come.

The child remained, for some minutes, watching the deaf old man as he
threw out the earth with his shovel, and, often stopping to cough and
fetch his breath, still muttered to himself, with a kind of sober
chuckle, that the sexton was wearing fast. At length she turned away,
and walking thoughtfully through the churchyard, came unexpectedly upon
the schoolmaster, who was sitting on a green grave in the sun, reading.

'Nell