When he arose half-an-hour later he looked withered and broken, and from that day his natural spirits left him.  Wounded to the quick by his son’s sarcastic stings, he indulged in liquor more and more frequently.  His wife had died some years before this date, and the sergeant lived alone in the house which had been hers.  One morning in the December under notice the report of a gun had been heard on his premises, and on entering the neighbours found him in a dying state.  He had shot himself with an old firelock that he used for scaring birds; and from what he had said the day before, and the arrangements he had made for his decease, there was no doubt that his end had been deliberately planned, as a consequence of the despondency into which he had been thrown by his son’s letter.  The coroner’s jury returned a verdict of felo de se.

‘Here’s his son’s letter,’ said one of the Sidlinch men. ’’Twas found in his father’s pocket.  You can see by the state o’t how many times he read it over.  Howsomever, the Lord’s will be done, since it must, whether or no.’

The grave was filled up and levelled, no mound being shaped over it.  The Sidlinch men then bade the Chalk-Newton choir good-night, and departed with the cart in which they had brought the sergeant’s body to the hill.  When their tread had died away from the ear, and the wind swept over the isolated grave with its customary siffle of indifference, Lot Swanhills turned and spoke to old Richard Toller, the hautboy player.

’’Tis hard upon a man, and he a wold sojer, to serve en so, Richard.  Not that the sergeant was ever in a battle bigger than would go into a half-acre paddock, that’s true.  Still, his soul ought to hae as good a chance as another man’s, all the same, hey?’

Richard replied that he was quite of the same opinion.  ’What d’ye say to lifting up a carrel over his grave, as ’tis Christmas, and no hurry to begin down in parish, and ’twouldn’t take up ten minutes, and not a soul up here to say us nay, or know anything about it?’

Lot nodded assent.  ‘The man ought to hae his chances,’ he repeated.

’Ye may as well spet upon his grave, for all the good we shall do en by what we lift up, now he’s got so far,’ said Notton, the clarionet man and professed sceptic of the choir.  ‘But I’m agreed if the rest be.’

They thereupon placed themselves in a semicircle by the newly stirred earth, and roused the dull air with the well-known Number Sixteen of their collection, which Lot gave out as being the one he thought best suited to the occasion and the mood

   He comes’ the pri’-soners to’ re-lease’,
   In Sa’-tan’s bon’-dage held’.

‘Jown it—­we’ve never played to a dead man afore,’ said Ezra Cattstock, when, having concluded the last verse, they stood reflecting for a breath or two.  ’But it do seem more merciful than to go away and leave en, as they t’other fellers have done.’