The final crown of it all, however, the last touch of reproduction on the pictures of my memory, was the arrival of that time for which, all night through, I waited and longed of old.  It was my custom, as the hours dragged on, to repeat the question, ’When will the carts come in?’ and repeat it again and again until at last those sounds arose in the street that I have heard once more this morning.  The road before our house is a great thoroughfare for early carts.  I know not, and I never have known, what they carry, whence they come, or whither they go.  But I know that, long ere dawn, and for hours together, they stream continuously past, with the same rolling and jerking of wheels and the same clink of horses’ feet.  It was not for nothing that they made the burthen of my wishes all night through.  They are really the first throbbings of life, the harbingers of day; and it pleases you as much to hear them as it must please a shipwrecked seaman once again to grasp a hand of flesh and blood after years of miserable solitude.  They have the freshness of the daylight life about them.  You can hear the carters cracking their whips and crying hoarsely to their horses or to one another; and sometimes even a peal of healthy, harsh horse-laughter comes up to you through the darkness.  There is now an end of mystery and fear.  Like the knocking at the door in Macbeth, {8} or the cry of the watchman in the Tour de Nesle, they show that the horrible caesura is over and the nightmares have fled away, because the day is breaking and the ordinary life of men is beginning to bestir itself among the streets.

In the middle of it all I fell asleep, to be wakened by the officious knocking at my door, and I find myself twelve years older than I had dreamed myself all night.

THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES

It is all very well to talk of death as ’a pleasant potion of immortality’, but the most of us, I suspect, are of ’queasy stomachs,’ and find it none of the sweetest. {9a} The graveyard may be cloak-room to Heaven; but we must admit that it is a very ugly and offensive vestibule in itself, however fair may be the life to which it leads.  And though Enoch and Elias went into the temple through a gate which certainly may be called Beautiful, the rest of us have to find our way to it through Ezekiel’s low-bowed door and the vault full of creeping things and all manner of abominable beasts.  Nevertheless, there is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation.  If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.  It was in obedience to this wise regulation that the other morning found me lighting my pipe at the entrance to Old Greyfriars’, thoroughly sick of the town, the country, and myself.