| 380 | 381 | 382 | 383 | 384 |
| 1 | 133 | 265 | 398 | 530 |
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would have had every stone, and plate of brass, the monument only of
deeds whose memory should survive. All others he was willing to
forget. They might be buried in consecrated ground, but he would
have had them buried deep, and never brought to light again.
It was from the lips of such a tutor, that the child learnt her easy task.
Already impressed, beyond all telling, by the silent building and the
peaceful beauty of the spot in which it stood -
majestic age
surrounded by perpetual youth - it seemed to her, when she heard
these things, sacred to all goodness and virtue. It was another world,
where sin and sorrow never came; a tranquil place of rest, where
nothing evil entered.
When the bachelor had given her in connection with almost every
tomb and flat grave-stone some history of its own, he took her down
into the old crypt, now a mere dull vault, and showed her how it had
been lighted up in the time of the monks, and how, amid lamps
depending from the roof, and swinging censers exhaling scented
odours, and habits glittering with gold and silver, and pictures, and
precious stuffs, and jewels all flashing and glistening through the low
arches, the chaunt of aged voices had been many a time heard there,
at midnight, in old days, while hooded figures knelt and prayed
around, and told their rosaries of beads. Thence, he took her above
ground again, and showed her, high up in the old walls, small
galleries, where the nuns had been wont to glide along - dimly seen in
their dark dresses so far off - or to pause like gloomy shadows,
listening to the prayers. He showed her too, how the warriors, whose
figures rested on the tombs, had worn those rotting scraps of armour
up above - how this had been a helmet, and that a shield, and that a
gauntlet - and how they had wielded the great two-handed swords,
and beaten men down, with yonder iron mace. All that he told the
child she treasured in her mind; and sometimes, when she awoke at
night from dreams of those old times, and rising from her bed looked
out at the dark church, she almost hoped to see the windows lighted
up, and hear the organ's swell, and sound of voices, on the rushing
wind.
The old sexton soon got better, and was about again. From him the
child learnt many other things, though of a different kind. He was not
able to work, but one day there was a grave to be made, and he came
to overlook the man who dug it. He was in a talkative mood; and the
child, at first standing by his side, and afterwards sitting on the grass
at his feet, with her thoughtful face raised towards his, began to
converse with him.
Now, the man who did the sexton's duty was a little older than he,
though much more active. But he was deaf; and when the sexton (who
peradventure, on a pinch, might have walked a mile with great
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