on the stones that lay above them. Texts of comfort
in which the fine, salt films crept, faint verses of sweet hymns defiled
by the perching sea-birds, old rhymes like homely ejaculations of very
simple hearts, sank into the gathering darkness on every hand. The
graves seemed murmuring to the night: "Look on me, I hold a lover;" "And
I--I keep fast a maiden;" "And within my arms crumbles a little child
caught by the sea;" "And I fold a mother, whose son is in the hideous
water foliage of the depths of the sea;" "And I embrace an old captain
whom the sea loved even in his hollow age." The last inscription that
stood clear to Peter Uniacke's eyes in the dying light ran thus:

"Here lies the body of Jack Pringle, cast up by the sea on December
4th, 1896. He was boy on the schooner 'Flying Fish.' His age
seventeen. 'Lead kindly Light.'"

Uniacke watched this history go into the maw of the darkness, and when
it was gone he found himself environed by the cool sea noises which
seemed to grow louder in the night, wondering whether the "Kindly Light"
was indeed leading on Jack Pringle, no longer boy on the schooner
"Flying Fish," but--what? The soul of a fisher lad, who had kissed his
girl, and drunk his glass, and told many a brave and unfitting tale, and
sworn many a lusty oath, following some torch along the radiant ways of
Heaven! Was that it? Uniacke had, possibly, preached now and then that
so indeed it was. Or, perhaps, was the light-hearted and careless living
lad caught fast, like sunk wreckage, in the under sea of Hell, where
pain is like a living fire in the moving dimness? "His age seventeen."
Could that be true and God merciful? With such thoughts, Uniacke greeted
the falling of night. In the broad daylight, full of the songs and of
the moving figures of his brawny fisher folk, he had felt less
poetically uncertain. He had said like men at sea, "All's well!" More,
he had been able to feel it. But now he leaned on the churchyard wall
and it was cold to his arms. And the song of the sea was cold in his
ears. And the night lay cold upon his heart. And his mind--in the grim,
and apparently unmeaning way of minds set to sad music in a sad
atmosphere--crept round and round about the gravestone of this boy;
bereft of boyhood so early, of manhood ere he won to it, and carried so
swiftly into mystery beyond the learning of all philosophy. Ignorance,
in jersey and dripping sea-boots, set face to face with all know