“Did you ever hear so impetuous a prayer?” I asked.

She answered my question by asking another: 

“Did you not like it?”

“I think it frightened me.  The clergyman seemed to be talking to some one right beside him.”

“Is not all prayer that—­talking, pleading with a God nigh at hand?”

I did not reply.  My eyes were fastened on the crowd now issuing from the cottage door; the coffin, carried by men, came first, the people pressing hurriedly after—­among them one whom I instinctively felt to be the clergyman—­a thick-set man with hair turning white, and a most noble, benignant face.  As the procession formed he took his place at the head; Daniel and his mother climbing into a wagon directly behind the hearse; the former looked utterly broken down, as if the light of his eyes had verily been quenched.

The procession then moved slowly along, and in a short time we turned out of the Mill Road, and into a beautiful shady street along the water’s edge.  I watched the sunlight on the shimmering waters, and far across, where one of the wooded headlands looked down into the sea, the green trees made such a picture on the water that, in watching this perfect bit of landscape, I found myself forgetting the solemn occasion, and the sorrowing heart of the solitary mourner, while I planned to come there the very next day with my sketch book, and secure this gem to send to my favorite teacher as a specimen of my new surroundings.  And then fancy got painting her own pictures as to what my work in this new life with its greatly altered meaning should be, and before we had reached the grave’s edge I had mapped out my ongoings for a long stretch of the future, and that in such eager, worldly fashion that I almost forgot that at the end of all this bright-hued future there lay for me, as well as for Daniel Blake’s wife, an open grave.  My busy thoughts were recalled by hearing the penetrating voice of the preacher saying “dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” with the remainder of the beautiful formula used by many of the churches in planting the human germ.  A glance around revealed Daniel Blake leaning in the very abandonment of grief on a tombstone at the grave’s side, and looking down into the coffin that was rapidly disappearing under the shovelfuls of clay.  A keen sense of my own heartlessness in feeling so happy within touch of such woe came over me, while a vague wonder seized me, if some other careless-hearted creatures might not be planning their joys some day in presence of my breaking heart.

CHAPTER V.

A new accomplishment learned.