rom another came the shrill tones
of a scolding woman. Every here and there was a town garden full of
sickly flowers, or a pile of crockery inside upon the window-seat. But
you do not grasp the full connection between these houses of the dead
and the living, the unnatural marriage of stately sepulchres and squalid
houses, till, lower down, where the road has sunk far below the surface
of the cemetery, and the very roofs are scarcely on a level with its
wall, you observe that a proprietor has taken advantage of a tall
monument and trained a chimney-stack against its back. It startles you
to see the red, modern pots peering over the shoulder of the tomb.

A man was at work on a grave, his spade clinking away the drift of bones
that permeates the thin brown soil; but my first disappointment had
taught me to expect little from Greyfriars' sextons, and I passed him by
in silence. A slater on the slope of a neighbouring roof eyed me
curiously. A lean black cat, looking as if it had battened on strange
meats, slipped past me. A little boy at a window put his finger to his
nose in so offensive a manner that I was put upon my dignity, and turned
grandly off to read old epitaphs and peer through the gratings into the
shadow of vaults.

Just then I saw two women coming down a path, one of them old, and the
other younger, with a child in her arms. Both had faces eaten with
famine and hardened with sin, and both had reached that stage of
degradation, much lower in a woman than a man, when all care for dress
is lost. As they came down they neared a grave, where some pious friend
or relative had laid a wreath of immortelles, and put a bell glass over
it, as is the custom. The effect of that ring of dull yellow among so
many blackened and dusty sculptures was more pleasant than it is in
modern cemeteries, where every second mound can boast a similar coronal;
and here, where it was the exception and not the rule, I could even
fancy the drops of moisture that dimmed the covering were the tears of
those who laid it where it was. As the two women came up to it, one of
them kneeled down on the wet grass and looked long and silently through
the clouded shade, while the second stood above her, gently oscillating
to and fro to lull the muling baby. I was struck a great way off with
something religious in the attitude of these two unkempt and haggard
women; and I drew near faster, but still cautiously, to hear what they
were saying. Surely on