Every village has its tragedy, alas! and that recounted in this following inscription is at least one faithful record of terrifying disaster. Again it seems at variance with the moral order of the world that these quiet fields should witness the terror this tiny memorial hints at. The stone is quite out of plumb and moss-covered, but underneath the lichen it reads: “Phebe, wife of Ezekiel Markham Died Jyly 14, 1806 Ae 49 Also their 3 Sons Bela, Ciba, and Brainad was burnt to Death in Oct 1793” “In the midst of life we are dead” The mother lived nearly thirteen years after. There is no neighboring record of the father. Perhaps the two migrated after the fearful holocaust, and he only returned to place his wife’s body beside the disfigured remains of her little ungrown men. Bela, Ciba, and Brainard rested lonesomely doubtless those thirteen waiting years, and many a night must their little ghosts have sat among the windflowers and hepaticas of spring, or wandered midst the drifted needles of the pines in the clear moonlight of summer, athirst for the mother’s soul of comfort and courage. Again in this intaglio “spelt by th’ unlettered Muse” rises the question of the stone-cutter’s knowledge of his mother tongue. The church of the dead villagers still abides. But nowhere are seen the remains of a school-house. Descendants of the cutter of Master Kelsey’s headstone haply had many orders. The sun of Indian summer upon the fallen leaves brings out their pungent sweetness. Except the blossoms of the subtle witch-hazel all the flowers are gone. The last fringed gentian fed by the oozing spring down the hill-side closed its blue cup a score of days ago. Every living thing rests. The scene is filled with a strange sense of waiting. And above is the silence of the sky. With such influences supervening upon their lives, these people of the early village--undisturbed as they were by any world call, and gifted with a fervid and patient faith--must daily have grown in consciousness of a homely Presence ever reaching under their mortality the Everlasting Arm. This potency abides, its very feeling is in the air above these graves--that some good, some divine is impendent--that the soul of the world is outstretching a kindred hand. In the calm and other-worldliness of their hill-top the eternal moralities of the Deuteronomy and of Sophocles stand clearer to human vision--the good that is mighty and never grows gray,--μέγας ἐν τούτοις θεὸς, οὐδὲ γηράσχει. The comings and goings, the daily labors, the hopes and interests of these early dwellers make an unspeakable appeal--their graves in the church-yard, the ruined foundations of their domestic life beyond--that their output of lives and years of struggle bore no more lasting local fruit, however their seed may now be scattered to the upbuilding of our South and West, the conversion of China, and our ordering of the Philippines.