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The place where they had chosen to pause was at the grave of old Patience Goodyear, and from the corner where we stood we could see their faces plainly as they turned and looked at each other with the moonbeams pouring over them. Was it fancy that made her look like a wraith, and he like some handsome demon given to haunting churchyards?
Cuthbert, Archbishop, 49. Darenth, 21. Dartford, 6, 7, 21, 24, 33. Deptford, 44. Destruction of gravestones, 75. Devonshire, 100, 103. Dickens country, 11. Diocesan Chancellor, 73. Disused graveyards, 71. Drogheda, 80. Drury Lane, 58. Dublin, 78; Museum, 99. Dunblane, 89. Dundee, 87. Early churchyards, 49. East Ham, 24. East Wickham, 10, 24. Edgware, 46. Edinburgh Museum, 99. Edward VI., 52.
The place looks exactly as if originally a collection of dunghills or, perhaps, of excavated earth, left to its natural course after the corpses had been thrown in and the rude billets set over them. The economy of the race is visible in their measure for the dead, and contrasts wonderfully with the roominess and delicate adornment of German churchyards in general.
I may observe that the Roman custom of bordering the public roads with tombs gives a significance to the inscriptions which some of them bore, such as, Siste, viator Aspice, viator, "Stop, traveller" "Look, traveller"; a significance which is altogether lost when the same inscriptions are carved, as we have often seen them, on tombstones in secluded country churchyards where no traveller ever passes by, and hardly even friends come to weep.
The Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds The other day on a stray spur of the Chiltern Hills I climbed up upon one of those high, abrupt, windy churchyards from which the dead seem to look down upon all the living. It was a mountain of ghosts as Olympus was a mountain of gods.
The evergreens of the south, as the old bishop observes, will not grow in the north, and a pine was unfitted for such a locality, being a vulgar tree. What else could it have been but the yew the sacred yew which our ancestors were in the habit of planting in their churchyards?
Each day from some house issued forth the procession of death, until all our little churchyards along the winding river had more new graves than old not to speak of that grim, unconsecrated God's-acre in the forest pass, more cruel still to think upon. And with all this to bear, there was no assurance that the morrow might not bring the torch and tomahawk of invasion to our very doors.
Through a myriad shades and reptiles, graves, churchyards and tombs, we made our way to view the land unmolested, until I happened to see some turning round and looking at me; in an instant, notwithstanding the prevailing silence, a whisper passed from one to another that there was a man from earth there.
At all events, I will sit up with you to-night, and see if I can convert my ancestor into a visiting acquaintance. Meanwhile your finger on your lip!" 'Twas now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn, and graves give up their dead.
There are many other old burial-grounds thoughtfully kept in as good, or even better, order than the two here quoted; but it is for the respect shewn to the ancient memorials of the village fathers, rather than the churchyards themselves, that I have ventured to select them as patterns for imitation.
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