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Chapter XVI
The sun was setting when they reached the wicket-gate at which the
path began, and, as the rain falls upon the just and unjust alike, it
shed its warm tint even upon the resting-places of the dead, and bade
them be of good hope for its rising on the morrow. The church was old
and grey, with ivy clinging to the walls, and round the porch.
Shunning the tombs, it crept about the mounds, beneath which slept
poor humble men: twining for them the first wreaths they had ever
won, but wreaths less liable to wither and far more lasting in their
kind, than some which were graven deep in stone and marble, and
told in pompous terms of virtues meekly hidden for many a year, and
only revealed at last to executors and mourning legatees.
The clergyman's horse, stumbling with a dull blunt sound among the
graves, was cropping the grass; at once deriving orthodox consolation
from the dead parishioners, and enforcing last Sunday's text that this
was what all flesh came to; a lean ass who had sought to expound it
also, without being qualified and ordained, was pricking his ears in an
empty pound hard by, and looking with hungry eyes upon his priestly
neighbour.
The old man and the child quitted the gravel path, and strayed among
the tombs; for there the ground was soft, and easy to their tired feet.
As they passed behind the church, they heard voices near at hand,
and presently came on those who had spoken.
They were two men who were seated in easy attitudes upon the grass,
and so busily engaged as to be at first unconscious of intruders. It
was not difficult to divine that they were of a class of itinerant
showmen - exhibitors of the freaks of Punch - for, perched cross-
legged upon a tombstone behind them, was a figure of that hero
himself, his nose and chin as hooked and his face as beaming as
usual. Perhaps his imperturbable character was never more strikingly
developed, for he preserved his usual equable smile notwithstanding
that his body was dangling in a most uncomfortable position, all loose
and limp and shapeless, while his long peaked cap, unequally
balanced against his exceedingly slight legs, threatened every instant
to bring him toppling down.
In part scattered upon the ground at the feet of the two men, and in
part jumbled together in a long flat box, were the other persons of the
Drama. The hero's wife and one child, the hobby-horse, the doctor,
the foreign gentleman who not being familiar with the language is
unable in the representation to express his ideas otherwise than by
the utterance of the word 'Shallabalah' three distinct times, the
radical neighbour who will by no means admit that a tin bell is an
organ, the executioner, and the devil, were all here. Their owners had
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