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Gravestones lay in every position except the level or the upright, and broken masses of monuments were scattered about. My horse bore me into the midst of it, and there, slow and stiff as he had risen, he lay down again. Once more I was astride of a long narrow stone.
There was no touch of paid hands anywhere, and the fragrance blew softly about the church. As you sat in your pew, you could look out through the wide-opened doors, and see the drooping branches, and the birds as they sat singing on the gravestones. The sad faces of the old people, the cheerful faces of the young, passed by up the aisle.
I don't want to sit here all day, thinking of it, with the wind driving the sand against the window, and nothing to look at but those white tombs in Lone Mountain Cemetery, and those white caps that might be gravestones too, and not a soul to talk to or even see pass by until I feel as if I were dead and buried also. If you were me you you you couldn't help crying too!"
The graveyard around the Abbey is still the only one which the village has, and is crowded with gravestones, among which I read the inscription of one erected by Sir Walter Scott to the memory of Thomas Pardy, one of his servants. Some sable birds either rooks or jackdaws were flitting about the ruins, inside and out. Mr.
"And of course you slept there?" "To be sure I did." "And met with nothing?" "Nothing, save a few bumps against the gravestones." "Those were hard knocks, I should say." "They were, I assure you; but I lay there, and slept there, and won my wager." "Would you do it again?" "No." "And why not?" "Because of the rheumatism." "You caught that?"
But the eighteenth-century gravestones in Ireland are not all of the primitive kind many of them being as artistic and well-finished as any to be found in other parts of the British Isles. The predominant type is the "I.H.S.," surmounted by the cross, which appears on probably four-fifths of the inscribed stones of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Ireland.
Better still, there was a sky overhead, in which men cannot set up any gravestones. But if any graveyard be the type of the rest expected by those left behind, it is no wonder they shrink from joining those that are away. When the last man had disappeared, the women, like those of an eastern harem, began to come out.
I began to watch their movements with growing interest, and could see that they, too, were very much interested in each other, although for a long time they did not exchange a word. Presently I, too, fell to examining the gravestones, just to get near them, and while pretending to be absorbed in the inscriptions I kept a sharp eye on their movements. They took no notice of me.
There stretches away south of us long garden slopes and white gravestones and the wide expanse of London, and somewhere in the picture is a red old wall, sun-warmed, and a great blaze of Michaelmas daisies set off with late golden sunflowers and a drift of mottled, blood-red, fallen leaves.
Inside, however, the crude whitewash, the curious assemblage of enormous seventeenth century gravestones that are leant against the walls, and the terribly jarring almost life-sized crucifix, all give one that feeling of revulsion that is inseparable from an ill-kept place of worship.
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