After a few moments' rest we walked on to the churchyard, and sat down upon a tombstone close to the principal porch. All the people of the village were assembled, sitting, or standing in groups, waiting for the clergyman's arrival. Mr. Brandon was just telling me, in answer to my expressions of admiration for a picturesque, ivy-grown old wall and house, which formed one of the boundaries of the churchyard, that they were part of the ruins of an ancient palace of King John's, when the carriage arrived, and we all went into church. It looked smaller still within than without, but its rude architecture had something religious as well as rustic about it, and the simple singing of the morning hymn by the school children seemed in accordance with it. As usual my mind wandered during the whole of the service, and though I knelt when others knelt, and stood when they stood, and though my lips mechanically repeated the responses, I never prayed except when occasionally some words in the Liturgy or in the Bible struck upon the secret feeling of my heart, and drew from it a mental ejaculation, a passionate appeal to Heaven, which was rather the cry of a wounded spirit than a direct address to the God between whom and my soul I felt as if the link of communion was broken. That day, however, little as I regularly attended to the service it had a soothing effect upon me. There was an old monument exactly opposite our seat, to which my eyes were continually reverting. It was that of a knight crusader and of his wife; their statues were lying side by side, in that rigid repose which unites the appearance of sleep and of death. There was peace in each line of those sculptured figures--an intensity of repose, the more striking from its association with some of the emblems of war. As I looked upon them I longed to be resting too. The clergyman was reading the morning lesson at that moment, and these words attracted my attention, "And they all fell seven together, and were put to death in the days of harvest; in the first days in the beginning of barley-harvest; and Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest, until water dropped upon them out of Heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night."