So the son left the father kneeling by the grave. Again a few years are passed. It is winter, with a roaring wind and a thick gray fog. The graves in the church-yard are covered with snow, and there are great icicles in the church-porch. The wind now carries a swathe of snow along the tops of the graves, as though the "sheeted dead" were at some melancholy play; and hark! the icicles fall with a crash and jingle, like a solemn mockery of the echo of the unseemly mirth of one who is now coming to his final rest. There are two graves near the old yew tree; and the grass has overgrown them. A third is close by; and the dark earth at each side has just been thrown up. The bearers come; with a heavy pace they move along; the coffin heaveth up and down, as they step over the intervening graves. Grief and old age had seized upon the father, and worn out his life; and premature decay soon seized upon the son, and gnawed away his vain ambition, and his useless strength, till he prayed to be borne, not the way yonder that was most opposite to his father and his mother, but even the same way they had gone--the way which leads to the Old Church-yard Tree. THE ENGLISH PEASANT. BY HOWITT. The English peasant is generally reckoned a very simple, monotonous animal; and most people, when they have called him a clown, or a country-hob, think they have described him. If you see a picture of him, he is a long, silly-looking fellow, in a straw hat, a white slop, and a pair of ankle-boots, with a bill in his hand--just as the London artist sees him in the juxta-metropolitan districts; and that is the English peasant. They who have gone farther into England, however, than Surrey, Kent, or Middlesex, have seen the English peasant in some different costume, under a good many different aspects; and they who will take the trouble to recollect what they have heard of him, will find him a rather multifarious creature. He is, in truth, a very Protean personage. What is he, in fact? A day-laborer, a woodman, a plowman, a wagoner, a collier, a worker in railroad and canal making, a gamekeeper, a poacher, an incendiary, a charcoal-burner, a keeper of village ale-houses, and Tom-and-Jerrys; a tramp, a pauper, pacing sullenly in the court-yard of a parish-union, or working in his frieze jacket on some parish-farm; a boatman, a road-side stone-breaker, a quarryman, a journeyman bricklayer, or his clerk; a shepherd, a drover, a rat-catcher, a mole-catcher, and a hundred other things; in any one of which, he is as different from the sheepish, straw-hatted, and ankle-booted, bill-holding fellow of the print-shop windows, as a cockney is from a Newcastle keelman.