"No one," said the sexton; "it will fit somebody, I warrant, and I shall get paid for it; and why should not I keep a ready made grave as a town cobbler keeps ready-made shoes? I am digging it out of my own fancy. There will be death somewhere before the week is out, I am sure; for I dreamed last night that I saw a wedding come to this church, and the bride and the bridegroom stepped on each of the grave hillocks as they walked--so there will be a death, that's certain, and may be two." "And so you are digging the grave on speculation, old fellow?" exclaimed the other, "but I dare say you have a shrewd guess whom it is for. There is some poor fellow ill in the neighbourhood--or some woman in a bad way, ha?" "It may be for the young man lying wounded up at Buxton's inn," answered the sexton; "they say he is better; but I should not wonder if it served his turn after all. But I don't know, there is never any telling who may go next. I've seen funny things in my day. Those who thought they had a long lease, find it was a short one: those who were wishing for other people's death, that they might get their money, die first themselves." The sexton paused, and the stranger did not make any answer, looking gloomily down into the pit as if he did not much like the last reflections that rose up from the bottom of the grave. "Aye, funny things enough I have seen," continued the sexton, after giving a stroke or two with his pickaxe; "but the funniest of all is, to see how folks take on at first for those who are gone, and how soon they get over it. Lord, what a lot of tears I have seen shed on this little bit of ground! and how soon they were dried up, like a shower in the sunshine. I recollect now there was a young lady sent down here for change of air by the London doctors, after they had poisoned her with their stuff, I dare say. A pretty creature she was as ever I set eyes on, and did not seem ill, only a bit of a cough. Her mother came with her, and then her lover, who was to be married to her when she got well. But at six months' end she died--there she lies, close on your left--and her lover, wasn't he terrible downcast? and he said to me when we had put her comfortably in the ground, 'I shan't be long after her, sexton; keep me that place beside her--there's a guinea for you.' He did not come back, however, for five years, and then I saw him one day go along the road in a chaise and four, with a fine lady by his side, as gay as a lark." "Well, you would not have the man go on whimpering all his life?" said the other; "how old are you, sexton?" "Sixty and eight last January," answered the other, "and I have dug these graves forty years come St. John." "Have you many old men in the parish?" asked the stranger. "The oldest is eighty-two," replied the sexton, "and she is a woman." "Six from eighty-two," said the stranger in a contemplative tone, "that leaves seventy-six. That will do very well."