slip quickly into that bitter oblivion to which the dead are consigned by
those too hurried to remember. They are not remembered perfunctorily for
their "good qualities" which are carved on their tombstones, but all the
quaint and dear absurdities which make up personality are embalmed in the
leisurely, peaceable talk of the village, still enriched by all that they
brought to it. We are not afraid of the event which men call death,
because we know that, in so far as we have deserved it, the same homely
immortality awaits us.

Every spring, at the sight of the first cowslip, our old people laugh and
say to each other, "Will you _ever_ forget how Aunt Dorcas used to take us
children out cowslipping, and how she never thought it 'proper' to lift
her skirt to cross the log by the mill, and always fell in the brook?" The
log has moldered away a generation ago, the mill is only a heap of
blackened timbers, but as they speak, they are not only children again,
but Aunt Dorcas lives again for them and for us who never saw
her ... dear, silly, kind old Aunt Dorcas, past-mistress in the lovely art
of spoiling children. Just so the children we have spoiled, the people we
have lived with, will continue to keep us living with them. We shall have
time to grow quite used to whatever awaits us after the tangled rosebushes
of Hillsboro burying-ground bloom over our heads, before we shall have
gradually faded painlessly away from the life of men and women. We
sometimes feel that, almost alone in the harassed and weary modern world,
we love that life, and yet we are the least afraid to leave it.

It is usually dark when the shabby little narrow-gauge train brings us
home to Hillsboro from wanderings in the great world, and the big pond by
the station is full of stars. Up on the hill the lights of the village
twinkle against the blurred mass of Hemlock Mountain, and above them the
stars again. It is very quiet, the station is black and deserted, the road