yellow like themselves; the rugged font where children had their

names, the homely altar where they knelt in after life, the plain black

tressels that bore their weight on their last visit to the cool old shady

church. Everything told of long use and quiet slow decay; the very

bell-rope in the porch was frayed into a fringe, and hoary with old age.

She was looking at a humble stone which told of a young man who

had died at twenty-three years old, fifty-five years ago, when she

heard a faltering step approaching, and looking round saw a feeble

woman bent with the weight of years, who tottered to the foot of that

same grave and asked her to read the writing on the stone. The old

woman thanked her when she had done, saying that she had had the

words by heart for many a long, long year, but could not see them

now.

Were you his mother?' said the child.

I was his wife, my dear.'

She the wife of a young man of three-and-twenty! Ah, true! It was fifty-

five years ago.

You wonder to hear me say that,' remarked the old woman, shaking

her head. 'You're not the first. Older folk than you have wondered at

the same thing before now. Yes, I was his wife. Death doesn't change

us more than life, my dear.'

Do you come here often?' asked the child.

I sit here very often in the summer time,' she answered, 'I used to

come here once to cry and mourn, but that was a weary while ago,

bless God!'

I pluck the daisies as they grow, and take them home,' said the old

woman after a short silence. 'I like no flowers so well as these, and

haven't for five-and-fifty years. It's a long time, and I'm getting very

old.'

Then growing garrulous upon a theme which was new to one listener

though it were but a child, she told her how she had wept and

moaned and prayed to die herself, when this happened; and how

when she first came to that place, a young creature strong in love and

grief, she had hoped that her heart was breaking as it seemed to be.

But that time passed by, and although she continued to be sad when

she came there, still she could bear to come, and so went on until it

was pain no longer, but a solemn pleasure, and a duty she had

learned to like. And now that five-and-fifty years were gone, she spoke

of the dead man as if he had been her son or grandson, with a kind of

The Old Curiosity Shop