Soon I saw the crowd about the station begin to move, and presently the funeral-bell swung out its solemn tones of lamentation; its measured, lingering strokes, mingled with the woful shrieking of the wind and the sighing of the pine-tree overhead, made a dirge of inexpressible force and melancholy.  A weight of grief seemed to settle on my very breath:  it was not real sorrow; for, though I knew it well, I had not felt yet that Frank was dead,—­it was not real to me,—­I could not take to my stunned perceptions the fact that he was gone.  It is the protest of Nature, dimly conscious of her original eternity, against this interruption of death, that it should always be such an interruption, so incredible, so surprising, so new.  No,—­the anguish that oppressed me now was not the true anguish of loss, but merely the effect of these adjuncts; the pain of want, of separation, of reaching in vain after that which is gone, of vivid dreams and tearful waking,—­all this lay in wait for the future, to be still renewed, still suffered and endured, till time should be no more.  Let all these pangs of recollection attest it,—­these involuntary bursts of longing for the eyes that are gone and the voice that is still,—­these recoils of baffled feeling seeking for the one perfect sympathy forever fled,—­these pleasures dimmed in their first resplendence for want of one whose joy would have been keener and sweeter to us than our own,—­these bitter sorrows crying like children in pain for the heart that should have soothed and shared them!  No,—­ there is no such dreary lie as that which prates of consoling Time!  You who are gone, if in heaven you know how we mortals fare, you know that life took from you no love, no faith,—­that bitterer tears fall for you to-day than ever wet your new graves,—­that the gayer words and the recalled smiles are only like the flowers that grow above you, symbols of the deeper roots we strike in your past existence,—­that to the true soul there is no such thing as forgetfulness, no such mercy as diminishing regret!

Slowly the long procession wound up the river,—­here, black with plumed hearse and sable mourners,—­there, gay with regimental band and bright uniforms,—­no stately, proper funeral, ordered by custom and marshalled by propriety, but a straggling array of vehicles:  here, the doctor’s old chaise,—­there, an open wagon, a dusty buggy, a long, open omnibus, such as the village-stable kept for pleasure-parties or for parties of mourning who wanted to go en masse.

All that knew Frank, in or about Ridgefield, and all who had sons or brothers in the army, swarmed to do him honor; and the quaint, homely array crept slowly through the valley, to the sound of tolling bell and moaning wind and the low rush of the swollen river,—­the first taste of war’s desolation that had fallen upon us, the first dark wave of a whelming tide!