Often on Sunday evening my father gathered us about the family table in the dining-room and read a sermon from Channing or Theodore Parker or James Martineau. I cannot recall to-day a single word or thought or impression that lingered from the sermons Channing preached, but I am sure that the force and power and courage of Parker left an impression on my life; and that even in my youth the kindly, gentle, loving words and thoughts of James Martineau were not entirely thrown away on me. The old preacher, as he stood before us on Sunday morning, never seemed quite like a man,—we felt that he was a holy being, and we looked on him with fear and reverence and awe. I remember meeting him in the field one day, and I tried to avoid him and get away; but he came to me and talked in the kindest and most entertaining way. He said nothing whatever about religion, and his voice and the expression of his face were not at all as they seemed when I sat in front of him in the hard pew during the terrible “long prayer.” But my father never feared him in the least, and often these two old men met for an evening to read their musty books, although I could not understand the reason why. After I had gone to bed at night I often heard them working away at their Greek, with more pains than any of the scholars at the school. I wondered why they did these tasks, when they had no parents to keep them at their work. I was too young to know that as these old men dug out the hard Greek roots, they felt the long stems reaching back through the toilsome years and bringing to their failing lives a feeling of hope and vigor from their departed youth. CHAPTER XI THE BURYING-GROUND Directly in the shelter of the church was the burying-ground. It had first been laid out at the corner of the road, on one side of the great building; but slowly and surely it crept around behind the sheds where the horses were hitched during the Sunday services, and then still farther on to the other side. The first part of the yard was almost filled with little mounds and leaning stones, and most of its silent tenants were forgotten by all save a few old people who lingered far beyond the natural term of life. The new yard, as we called it, was in every way more pretentious than the old; the headstones were higher, the grass was greener, the mounds were more regular, and the trees and shrubs were better kept. The bones of many of the dead aristocracy had been dug up out of the old yard by their proud relatives, and carefully laid in the new, where they might rest in the same exclusive surroundings in which they lived while still upon the earth.