A hideous chunk of stone stood in the middle of a plot, from which the graves rayed out like the spokes of a wheel--and old Thomas, with a cane, which so surely only appeared on Sundays that a bad little boy once said: “God made the Sabbath day and old Brockwell’s cane!”--with this cane he immediately bored a little hole at the foot of one grave and remarked: “I buried my _first_ wife there”--and Emily brought her jaws to with a snap, and bowed her head slightly, as though acknowledging an introduction. Then she chewed again, and old Thomas yanked out the cane with some effort, as though Mrs. Brockwell No. 1 was holding on to it. Then he bored another little hole at the foot of another grave with the cane and announced: “I buried my eldest son here”--another stoppage of the jaws and another bow--and so the old “borer” went on, till each member of the family had been presented to the new-comer in turn, and then he gave the final touch of brightness to this very original bridal outing by carefully measuring with the cane the space, to see if there was enough left for two more spokes to his family “wheel of death.” Mrs. Brockwell was wont to declare she would remember that day as long as she lived. Not because her sensibilities were wounded, but because she had not been constructed for rapid action, and she declared she would never have lived through the homeward walk but for the sustaining power of an extra piece of gum, which she luckily had in her pocket--for this was the golden age of the world when women still had pockets. Old Thomas Brockwell narrowly--very narrowly--escaped being a religious monomaniac. Unquestionably sincere, his religion was yet a thing so warped and bitter as to fill most people with shrinking dread. He studied only the Old Testament, rarely reading the New. In his ears the rolling thunders of Sinai drowned the gentle “Voice” preaching from the “Mount.” He believed in a personal Devil--he believed in a material Hell. I have never known anyone who got as much satisfaction out of the _whole_ of his religion as he got out of Hell alone. He talked of it, thought of it, and, in regretful tones, told many of his friends that they were going _there_. All its accessories were dear to him. The “brimstone,” the “burning lake” and that “undying worm,” which seemed, in his imagination, something between a boaconstrictor and a Chinese dragon, while the “bottomless pit” not only gave him two words to roll sweetly under his tongue, but provided an ideal place to shake frightened little boys over at Sunday-school--for he labored faithfully Sunday after Sunday to frighten sinful youth into the church or the idiot asylum.