The pastor cut down the rank grass and fringy ferns, the flaunting weeds and coreopsis that threatened to choke his more delicate flowers, and, stooping, tied up the crimson pinks, and wound the tendrils of the blue-veined clematis around its slender trellis, and straightened the white petunias and the orange-tinted crocaes, which the last heavy shower had beaten to the ground.

The small, gray vault was overrun with ivy, whose dark, polished leaves threatened to encroach on a plain slab of pure marble that stood very near it; and as the minister pruned away the wreaths, his eyes rested on the black letters in the centre of the slab:  “Murray Hammond.  Aged 21.”

Elsewhere the sunshine streamed warm and bright over the graves, but here the rays were intercepted by the church, and its cool shadow rested over vault and slab and flowers.

The old man was weary from stooping so long, and now he took off his hat and passed his hand over his forehead, and sighed as he leaned against the door of the vault, where fine, fairy-fingered mosses were weaving their green arabesque immortelles.

In a mournfully measured, yet tranquil tone, he said aloud: 

“Ah! truly throughout all the years of my life I have never heard the promise of perfect love, without seeing aloft amongst the stars, fingers as of a man’s hand, writing the sacred legend:  ’Ashes to ashes! dust to dust!’”

Age was bending his body toward the earth with which it was soon to mingle; the ripe and perfect wheat nodded lower and lower day by day, as the Angel of the Sickle delayed; but his noble face wore that blessed and marvellous calm, that unearthly peace which generally comes some hours after death, when all traces of temporal passions and woes are lost in eternity’s repose.

A low, wailing symphony throbbed through the church, where the organist was practising; and then out of the windows, and far away on the evening air, rolled the solemn waves of that matchlessly mournful Requiem which, under prophetic shadows, Mozart began on earth and finished, perhaps in heaven, on one of those golden harps whose apocalyptic ringing smote St. John’s eager ears among the lonely rocks of Aegean-girdled Patmos.  The sun had paused as if to listen on the wooded crest of a distant hill, but as the Requiem ended and the organ sobbed itself to rest, he gathered up his burning rays and disappeared; and the spotted butterflies, like “winged tulips,” flitted silently away, and the evening breeze bowed the large yellow primroses, and fluttered the phlox; the red nasturtiums that climbed up at the foot of the slab shuddered and shook their blood-colored banners over the polished marble.  A holy hush fell upon all things save a towering poplar that leaned against the church, and rustled its leaves ceaselessly, and shivered and turned white, as tradition avers it has done since that day, when Christ staggered along the Via Dolorosa bearing his cross, carved out of poplar wood.