After the sermon, Paul Flemming walked forth alone into the churchyard.  There was no one there, save a little boy, who was fishing with a pin hook in a grave half full of water.  But a few moments afterward, through the arched gateway under the belfry, came a funeral procession.  At its head walked a priest in white surplice, chanting.  Peasants, old and young, followed him, with burning tapers in their hands.  A young girl carried in her arms a dead child, wrapped in its little winding sheet.  The grave was close under the wall, by the church door.  A vase of holy water stood beside it.  The sexton took the child from the girl’s arms, and put it into a coffin; and, as he placed it in the grave, the girl held over it a cross, wreathed with roses, and the priest and peasants sang a funeral hymn.  When this was over, the priest sprinkled the grave and the crowd with holy water; and then they all went into the church, each one stopping as he passed the grave to throw a handful of earth into it, and sprinkle it with holy water.

A few moments afterwards, the voice of the priest was heard saying mass in the church, and Flemming saw the toothless old sexton treading the fresh earth into the grave of the little child, with his clouted shoes.  He approached him, and asked the age of the deceased.  The sexton leaned a moment on his spade, and shrugging his shoulders replied;

“Only an hour or two.  It was born in the night, and died this morning early?”

“A brief existence,” said Flemming.  “The child seems to have been born only to be buried, and have its name recorded on a wooden tombstone.”

The sexton went on with his work, and made no reply.  Flemming still lingered among the graves, gazing with wonder at the strange devices, by which man has rendered death horrible and the grave loathsome.

In the Temple of Juno at Elis, Sleep and his twin-brother Death were represented as children reposing in the arms of Night.  On various funeral monuments of the ancients the Genius of Death issculptured as a beautiful youth, leaning on an inverted torch, in the attitude of repose, his wings folded and his feet crossed.  In such peaceful and attractive forms, did the imagination of ancient poets and sculptors represent death.  And these were men in whose souls the religion of Nature was like the light of stars, beautiful, but faint and cold!  Strange, that in later days, this angel of God, which leads us with a gentle hand, into the “Land of the great departed, into the silent Land,” should have been transformed into a monstrous and terrific thing!  Such is the spectral rider on the white horse;—­such the ghastly skeleton with scythe and hour-glass;—­the Reaper, whose name is Death!