Rising against the screen which separated this mouldy portion of the church from the rest, stood an old monument of carved wood, once brilliantly painted in the portions that bore the arms of the family over whose vault it stood, but now all bare and worn, itself gently flowing away into the dust it commemorated.  It lifted its gablet, carved to look like a canopy, till its apex was on a level with the book-board on the front of the organ-loft; and over—­in fact upon this apex appeared the face of the man whom I have mentioned.  It was a very remarkable countenance—­pale, and very thin, without any hair, except that of thick eyebrows that far over-hung keen, questioning eyes.  Short bushy hair, gray, not white, covered a well formed head with a high narrow forehead.  As I have said, those keen eyes kept looking at me from under their gray eyebrows all the time of the sermon—­intelligently without doubt, but whether sympathetically or otherwise I could not determine.  And indeed I hardly know yet.  My vestry door opened upon a little group of graves, simple and green, without headstone or slab; poor graves, the memory of whose occupants no one had cared to preserve.  Good men must have preceded me here, else the poor would not have lain so near the chancel and the vestry-door.  All about and beyond were stones, with here and there a monument; for mine was a large parish, and there were old and rich families in it, more of which buried their dead here than assembled their living.  But close by the vestry-door, there was this little billowy lake of grass.  And at the end of the narrow path leading from the door, was the churchyard wall, with a few steps on each side of it, that the parson might pass at once from the churchyard into his own shrubbery, here tangled, almost matted, from luxuriance of growth.  But I would not creep out the back way from among my people.  That way might do very well to come in by; but to go out, I would use the door of the people.  So I went along the church, a fine old place, such as I had never hoped to be presented to, and went out by the door in the north side into the middle of the churchyard.  The door on the other side was chiefly used by the few gentry of the neighbourhood; and the Lych-gate, with its covered way, (for the main road had once passed on that side,) was shared between the coffins and the carriages, the dead who had no rank but one, that of the dead, and the living who had more money than their neighbours.  For, let the old gentry disclaim it as they may, mere wealth, derived from whatever source, will sooner reach their level than poor antiquity, or the rarest refinement of personal worth; although, to be sure, the oldest of them will sooner give to the rich their sons or their daughters to wed, to love if they can, to have children by, than they will yield a jot of their ancestral preeminence, or acknowledge any equality in their sons or daughters-in-law.  The carpenter’s son is to them an old myth, not an everlasting fact.  To Mammon alone will they yield a little of their rank—­none of it to Christ.  Let me glorify God that Jesus took not on.  Him the nature of nobles, but the seed of Adam; for what could I do without my poor brothers and sisters?