The road along which it traveled was no longer a deeply scarred trail, rutted through its clay surface by the hauling of lumber.  It was metaled and smooth.  There were many changes in the character of things hereabouts—­all changes which attested that the curse of decay and hopeless sterility had been lifted.  Off through a rift in the hills loomed the white concrete abutment of an aqueduct—­and through the valley wound a railroad.  A man might have walked many miles and come upon few deserted habitations, preyed upon by the twin vandals Time and Decay and staring blankly out through unglazed windows.  What had once been a land of abandoned farms, a battle-ground where poverty had fought and defeated humanity, was now a land redeemed.  Honest thrift and substantial comfort had crowned it with reclamation.

The church to which the hearse was making its way had also changed in aspect.  The tumbledown building had become a more worthy house of worship, unelaborate, but renewed.  Its belfry stood upright and on the Sabbath spoke out in the music of its chimes.  Graves where once the headstones had teetered in neglect lay now in rows of ordered care, and those who slept in them no longer slept among the briars of over-grown thickets.

About the building, waiting for the coming of a new tenant in the acre of the dead, were gathered a score or more of neighbors, because the body which was to be laid to rest today had been, in life, the member of a family which they delighted to honor and respect.

Along the stone wall which skirted the road, and under the wild apple trees, were hitched the wagons and buggies that had brought them from many miles around, across the hills.  Some of them came from houses far back where roads narrowed and grew precipitous.

Yet even among those who stood waiting in the churchyard near the reminder of an open grave, the lyric tunefulness of this June morning refused to surrender unconditionally to sadness.  Off between the fence and the rising slope of the nearest hill a ripple ran across a yellow field of buckwheat and from a fence-post a golden-breasted lark sang merrily.

Those who had arrived earliest gossiped of such commonplace matters as make the round of life where small things take the place of large excitement, and their faces were not gloomy faces.  Young men and girls among them were strolling apart, and the smiles in their eyes told that to them death was an incident, but June and love a nearer fact—­a thing closer to their youth.

Then around the turn came the procession which they awaited—­a hearse, followed by several buck-boards and buggies.

At the open gate it halted and the pall-bearers lifted down the casket from its place, and bore it to the spot which had been prepared for its reception.  There were no formal designs from the shop of any florist, but from every neighborhood garden had come contributions out of that wealth which this golden month was squandering in blossom.  Roses and peonies and a brave display of those varied flowers that go in rows about old-fashioned gardens had been gathered and brought by sympathetic hands.