The church and the graveyard were closely associated in my mind. It seemed to me, as a little child, that the church had full jurisdiction of the yard, and that the care and protection of the graves and their mouldering tenants were the chief reasons why the church was there. The great bell tolled slowly and mournfully at each death, and we counted the solemn strokes to know the age of the hapless one whose turn had come. Sometimes we could even guess who had died, from the number of times it struck; but even these strokes did not impress me much. Almost always the number was very great. I could not see any connection between these old people and myself; and, besides, I felt that if the time could ever come when I had grown so old, I would have lived far beyond an age when there was any joy in life. On the day of the funeral, too, the bell commenced to toll when the hearse came into view from the church and began its slow journey up the hill, and it did not cease until the last carriage was inside the yard. The importance of the dead could always be told by the length of time the old bell rang while the procession crawled up the hill. We used to compare these processions, and dispute as to who had the longest funeral; but after old Squire Allen’s turn had come, there was no longer any doubt. As I grew older, and began to give rein to my ambitions and dreams, I hoped and rather believed that in the far-off years I might have a longer procession than the one that had followed him to the little yard, but of late years I have rather lost interest in this old ambition. At almost every mound stood a white marble slab, and sometimes there was a grand and pretentious monument in the centre of the lot. When I was very young, I thought that those who had the finest monuments were the ones most loved and mourned. It was long before I realized that even the barred gates of a graveyard could not keep vanity outside. I often heard the neighbors talk about these stones. Sometimes they said it was strange that Farmer Smith could not show enough respect for his wife to put up a finer gravestone. Again, they said that it would have been better if Farmer Brown had been kinder to his wife while she lived, than to have put up such a grand monument after she was dead.