broke three good pickaxes, ere they got through the hard
brown sod, streaked with little maps of gray where old Sir Ensor was to
lie, upon his back, awaiting the darkness of the Judgment-day. It was in
the little chapel-yard; I will not tell the name of it; because we are
now such Protestants, that I might do it an evil turn; only it was the
little place where Lorna's Aunt Sabina lay.

Here was I, remaining long, with a little curiosity; because some people
told me plainly that I must be damned for ever by a Papist funeral; and
here came Lorna, scarcely breathing through the thick of stuff around
her, yet with all her little breath steaming on the air, like frost.

I stood apart from the ceremony, in which of course I was not entitled,
either by birth or religion, to bear any portion; and indeed it would
have been wiser in me to have kept away altogether; for now there was no
one to protect me among those wild and lawless men; and both Carver
and the Counsellor had vowed a fearful vengeance on me, as I heard from
Gwenny. They had not dared to meddle with me while the chief lay dying;
nor was it in their policy, for a short time after that, to endanger
their succession by an open breach with Lorna, whose tender age and
beauty held so many of the youths in thrall.

The ancient outlaw's funeral was a grand and moving sight; more perhaps
from the sense of contrast than from that of fitness. To see those dark
and mighty men, inured to all of sin and crime, reckless both of man and
God, yet now with heads devoutly bent, clasped hands, and downcast eyes,
following the long black coffin of their common ancestor, to the place
where they must join him when their sum of ill was done; and to see the
feeble priest chanting, over the dead form, words the living would
have laughed at, sprinkling with his little broom drops that could not
purify; while the children, robed in white, swung their smoking censers
slowly over the cold and twilight grave; and after seeing all, to ask,
with a shudder unexpressed, 'Is this the end that God intended for a man
so proud and strong?'

Not a tear was shed upon him, except from the sweetest of all sweet
eyes; not a sigh pursued him home. Except in hot anger, his life had
been cold, and bitter, and distant; and now a week had exhausted all
the sorrow of those around him, a grief flowing less from affection than
fear. Aged men will show his tombstone; mothers haste with their infants
by it; childr