The end of all living

The First Church of Tiverton stands on a hill, whence it overlooks the little

village, with one or two pine-shaded neighborhoods beyond, and, when

the air is clear, a thin blue line of upland delusively like the sea. Set thus

austerely aloft, it seems now a survival of the day when men used to go

to meeting gun in hand, and when one stayed, a lookout by the door, to

watch and listen. But this the present dwellers do not remember.

Conceding not a sigh to the holy and strenuous past, they lament--and

the more as they grow older--the stiff climb up the hill, albeit to rest in so

sweet a sanctuary at the top. For it is sweet indeed. A soft little wind

seems always to be stirring there, on summer Sundays a messenger of

good. It runs whispering about, and wafts in all sorts of odors: honey of

the milkweed and wild rose, and a Christmas tang of the evergreens just

below. It carries away something, too--scents calculated to bewilder the

thrift-hunting bee: sometimes a whiff of peppermint from an old lady's

pew, but oftener the breath of musk and southernwood, gathered in

ancient gardens, and borne up here to embroider the preacher's drowsy

homilies, and remind us, when we faint, of the keen savor of

righteousness.

Here in the church do we congregate from week to week; but behind it,

on a sloping hillside, is the last home of us all, the old burying-ground,

overrun with a briery tangle, and relieved by Nature's sweet and cunning

hand from the severe decorum set ordinarily about the dead. Our very

faithlessness has made it fair. There was a time when we were a little

ashamed of it. We regarded it with affection, indeed, but affection of the

sort accorded some rusty relative who has lain too supine in the rut of

years. Thus, with growing ambition came, in due course, the project of a

new burying-ground. This we dignified, even in common speech; it was

always grandly "the Cemetery." While it lay unrealized in the distance, the

home of our forbears fell into neglect, and Nature marched in, according

to her lavishness, and adorned what we ignored. The white alder crept

farther and farther from its bounds; tansy and wild rose rioted in

profusion, and soft patches of violets smiled to meet the spring. Here

were, indeed, great riches, "a little of everything" that pasture life affords: a hardy bed of checkerberry, crimson strawberries nodding on

long stalks, and in one sequestered corner the beloved Linnaea. It

seemed a consecrated pasture shut off from daily use, and so given up to

pleasantness that you could scarcely walk there without setting foot on

some precious outgrowth of the spring, or pushing aside a summer

loveliness better made for wear.

Ambition had its fulfillment. We bought our Cemetery, a large, green

tract, quite square, and lying open to the sun. But our pendulum had

swung too wide. Like many folk who suffer from one discomfort, we had

gone to the utmost extreme and courted another. We were tired of

climbing hills, and so we pressed too far into the lowland; and the first

grave dug in our Cemetery showed three inches of water at the bottom. It

was in "Prince's new lot," and there his young daughter was to lie. But her

lover had stood by while the men were making the grave; and, looking

into the ooze below, he woke to the thought of her fair young body there.

"God!" they heard him say, "she sha'n't lay so. Leave it as it is, an' come

up into the old buryin'-ground. There's room enough by me."

The men, all mates of his, stopped work without a glance and followed

him; and up there in the dearer shrine her place was made. The father

said but a word at her changed estate. Neighbors had hurried in to bring

him the news; he went first to the unfinished grave in the Cemetery, and

then strode up the hill, where the men had not yet done. After watching

them for a while in silence, he turned aside; but he came back to drop a

trembling hand upon the lover's arm.

"I guess," he said miserably, "she'd full as lieves lay here by you."

And she will be quite beside him, though, in the beaten ways of earth,

others have come between. For years he lived silently and apart; but

when his mother died, and he and his father were left staring at the

dulled embers of life, he married a good woman, who perhaps does not

deify early dreams; yet she is tender of them, and at the death of her

own child it was she who went toiling up to the graveyard, to see that its

little place did not encroach too far. She gave no reason, but we all knewit was because she meant to let her husband lie there by the long-loved

guest.

Naturally enough, after this incident of the forsaken grave, we conceived

a strange horror of the new Cemetery, and it has remained deserted to

this day. It is nothing but a meadow now, with that one little grassy

hollow in it to tell a piteous tale. It is mown by any farmer who chooses to

take it for a price; but we regard it differently from any other plot of

ground. It is "the Cemetery," and always will be. We wonder who has

bought the grass. "Eli's got the Cemetery this year," we say. And

sometimes awe-stricken little squads of school children lead one another

there, hand in hand, to look at the grave where Annie Prince was going to

be buried when her beau took her away. They never seem to connect that

heart-broken wraith of a lover with the bent farmer who goes to and fro

driving the cows. He wears patched overalls, and has sciatica in winter;

but I have seen the gleam of youth awakened, though remotely, in his

eyes. I do not believe he ever quite forgets; there are moments, now and

then, at dusk or midnight, all his for poring over those dulled pages of the

past.

After we had elected to abide by our old home, we voted an enlargement

of its bounds; and thereby hangs a tale of outlawed revenge. Long years

ago "old Abe Eaton" quarreled with his twin brother, and vowed, as the

last fiat of an eternal divorce, "I won't be buried in the same yard with

ye!"

The brother died first; and because he lay within a little knoll beside the

fence, Abe willfully set a public seal on that iron oath by purchasing a

strip of land outside, wherein he should himself be buried. Thus they

would rest in a hollow correspondence, the fence between. It all fell out

as he ordained, for we in Tiverton are cheerfully willing to give the dead

their way. Lax enough is the helpless hand in the fictitious stiffness of its

grasp; and we are not the people to deny it holding, by courtesy at least.

Soon enough does the sceptre of mortality crumble and fall. So Abe was

buried according to his wish. But when necessity commanded us to add

unto ourselves another acre, we took in his grave with it, and the fence,

falling into decay, was never renewed. There he lies, in affectionate

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