Hugh was wandering as his custom was, one hot and thunderous day, in the country lanes; it was very still, and through the soft haze that filled the air, the distant trees and fields lost their remoteness, and stood stiffly and quaintly as though painted. There seemed a presage of storm in the church-tower, which showed a ghostly white among the elms. A fitful breeze stirred at intervals. Hugh drew near the hamlet, and all of a sudden stepped into a stream of inconceivable sweetness and fragrance; he saw in a moment what was its origin. The strawberry-pickers were out in a broad field, and from the crushed berries, however lightly bruised, there poured this flow of scent, at once rich and pure, with all the native soul of the fruit exhaling upon the air. It was to other familiar scents like ointment poured forth; it seemed indeed to Hugh that anything so intensely impressive to the sense ought to have power to tinge the colourless air, which was thus so exquisitely laden and impregnated. He was now close to the church. It was a little, low, ancient structure, with a small, quaint, open belfry, beautifully proportioned, and all built out of a soft and mellow grey stone. The grass grew long in the churchyard, which was not so much neglected as wisely left alone, and an abundance of pink mallow, growing very thickly, gave a touch of bright colour to the grass. He stopped for a while considering the grave of a child, who had died at the age of five years, with an artless epitaph painted on a wooden cross. The grave was piously tended, though it bore a date of some ten years back; there were little rose-trees growing there, and a border of pansies, all the work, Hugh fancied, of children, doing gentle honour to a dead sister; whom they thought of, no doubt, as lying below in all her undimmed childish beauty; the pale face, the waxen limbs, the flowing hair, as they had looked their last upon her, waiting in a quiet sleep for the dawn of that other morning. How much better to think of her so, than of the dreadful reality which Hugh, in a sudden, almost terrified, flash of fancy, knew to be lying, an almost insupportable blot upon all that was fair and seemly, in the stained and mouldered coffin. Yet there was a place for that difficult horror too in the scheme of things, though the thought seemed almost to taint the sweet air of the place. This was only one of the parts of the great mystery over which he brooded so often; the noisome things of the world, its weakness, its decay; the shivering repugnance of the spirit, the almost impossibility of joy or courage in the presence of such thoughts; that was the strangest part of it, the rebellion of the inmost central spirit against what was so natural, so common. Death was harsh enough, but that it should be attended with such an extremity of disgrace and degradation--that seemed an intolerable thing.