graveyard, at the other side of the Methodist church, was a neat
and proper and doleful spot; but the old one had been left so
long to Nature's kindly and gracious ministries that it had
become very pleasant.

It was surrounded on three sides by a dyke of stones and sod,
topped by a gray and uncertain paling. Outside the dyke grew a
row of tall fir trees with thick, balsamic boughs. The dyke,
which had been built by the first settlers of the Glen, was old
enough to be beautiful, with mosses and green things growing out
of its crevices, violets purpling at its base in the early spring
days, and asters and golden-rod making an autumnal glory in its
corners. Little ferns clustered companionably between its
stones, and here and there a big bracken grew.

On the eastern side there was neither fence nor dyke. The
graveyard there straggled off into a young fir plantation, ever
pushing nearer to the graves and deepening eastward into a thick
wood. The air was always full of the harp-like voices of the
sea, and the music of gray old trees, and in the spring mornings
the choruses of birds in the elms around the two churches sang of
life and not of death. The Meredith children loved the old
graveyard.

Blue-eyed ivy, "garden-spruce," and mint ran riot over the sunken
graves. Blueberry bushes grew lavishly in the sandy corner next
to the fir wood. The varying fashions of tombstones for three
generations were to be found there, from the flat, oblong, red
sandstone slabs of old settlers, down through the days of weeping
willows and clasped hands, to the latest monstrosities of tall