Could any other than the simple ancient churchyard of bygone days have suggested that sweetest, purest, noblest elegy in our mother tongue? Do not our hearts yearn with an intense and tender longing toward that church, at whose font we were baptized, at whose communion-table we reverently bowed, before whose altar we breathed the marriage vows, from whose silent chancel we shall one day be softly and slowly borne away to our last, long sleep? Why not lay us down to rest, where the organ that pealed at our wedding and sobbed its requiem over our senseless clay may still breathe its loving dirges across our graves in winter's leaden storms, or in fragrant amber-aired summer days? Would worldly vampires, such as political or financial schemes, track a man's footsteps down the aisle, and flap their fatal numbing pinions over his soul so securely even in the Sanctuary of the Lord, if from his family pew his eyes wandered now and then to the marble slab that lay like a benediction over the silver head of an honoured father or mother, or the silent form of a beloved wife, sister, or brother? Is there a woman so callous, so steeped in folly, that the tinsel of Vanity Fair, the paraphernalia of fashion, or all the thousand small fiends that beleaguer the female soul, could successfully lure her imagination from holy themes, when sitting in front of the pulpit, she yet sees through the open windows where butterflies like happy souls flutter in and out the motionless chiselled cenotaph that rests like a sentinel above the pulseless heart that once enshrined her image, called her wife, and beat in changeless devotion against her own; or the little grassy billow sown thick with violets that speak to her of the blue eyes beneath them, where in dreamless slumber that needs no mother's cradling arms, no maternal lullaby, reposes the waxen form, the darling golden head of her long-lost baby? What spot so peculiarly suited for "God's acre" as that surrounding God's temple? A residence of dearly four years' duration at the parsonage had rendered this quiet churchyard a favourite retreat with Regina, and, divesting the graves of all superstitious terrors, had awakened in her nature only a most profound and loving reverence for the precincts of the dead. To-day, longing for some secluded spot in which to indulge the melancholy feelings that oppressed her, she instinctively sought the church, yielding unconscious homage to its hallowed and soothing influence. Passing slowly and carefully among the head-stones, she went into the church, to which she had access at all times by a key, which enabled her to enter at will and practise on the small organ that was generally used in Sabbath-school music.