brick walls and city pavements, with those long, swinging reaches of
green, and their silent benediction filled and soothed my very soul.

At last, when the low-lying hills began to cast cool shadows down their
eastern slopes, there appeared against the velvet green of the distance
the sprawling blotch of a little town, ugly, naked, and unashamed in
its bustling newness. And nearer, by a mile or more, on a green slope
which caught the golden-red rays of the sinking sun, was a little
enclosure, naked and ugly as the town itself, but silent and
awe-inspiring with the silence and awe of death. A barbed-wire fence
enclosed it, and the prairie turf still covered much of its space.
There were here no sunken mounds, no reeling headstones, no discolored
marbles. The grave heaps were trimly rounded, the wooden crosses which
marked most of them grinned their newness, and the few headstones and
monuments shone upstartishly white in the sun. Barren of that curtain
of verdure with which love strives to conceal the footprints of death,
the little cemetery lay there against the green hillside like some
fresh, gaping, ghastly wound in the face of a loved one.

One grave stood out startlingly from the rest. On the others only an
infrequent trailing vine or a faded bunch of flowers told of loving
effort to cover death's nakedness. But this one, which lay in the
centre of the enclosure, was covered from headstone to foot-cross with
a dense growth of hollyhocks. Their tall shafts were clothed with a
luxuriance of vivid red bloom, as if they had sucked into their petals
the life blood of the sleeper below. In the level red sun-rays they
glowed with lusty contempt of the silent impotence beneath them.

A woman in a white dress, with her hands full of the red hollyhock
blooms, walked between the graves down to the barred gate and came out