The low large moon, was flooding the sacred place with its soft radiance, so that the inscriptions were as plain to be seen as in broad noonday. From knoll to knoll, each roofing sacred dust, Ralph wandered, not unmoved; for he too had lost a dear one by untimely death, and even now was looking for the place where haply she might lie. He would have felt it in some sort a comfort to know that her bones rested beneath the rounded turf, rather than in yonder shifting deep, although, beyond the wooded village with its scattered lights, it lay as motionless at present as a silver pall. No less than thrice, he came upon the tombs of those with whom he had been a fellow-passenger on board that doomed ship so many years ago. Time had done its work with these, and they were not easily deciphered; but he carefully spelled them out--_John Robins, mate of the North Star, which foundered at sea on the night of September 14, 1832._ Poor Robins! Ralph remembered him very well. They had been fellow-townsmen together at Bleamouth, a circumstance which had troubled him at first, sailing as he did under a feigned name; but they had met but once before, and the mate had, as it turned out, no remembrance of him. But Ralph well remembered what uneasiness the possibility of recognition had given him at the time, for it might have been supposed that he had committed some disgraceful crime, which would cause him, and what was worse, his wife and the Meades, to be looked upon askance throughout the voyage. But what did it matter now? What had anything mattered to that great ship's company, so full of plans and projects for beginning life afresh under other skies! Death had made sudden and swift provision for them all.--_Sarah Button, aged 69, and Henry, her son. The bodies of his four children, and of Helen, his wife, who perished in the same storm, never came to shore_.--Ralph remembered the gaunt, strong old woman, who did not hesitate, within a year of man's allotted span, to cross the ocean; she and her son were as like as difference of age and sex could permit of likeness; but the children, like the wife, were delicate and sickly. It seemed somehow fitting enough that these two, though dead, should have come to land; while the others, poor things, should have succumbed to the stormy deep. The third inscription was even a more remarkable one. Upon a huge recumbent slab, which evidently roofed the remains of more than one person, were engraved these words: _Beneath this stone are laid the bones of those who were washed on shore from the wreck of the North Star, but whose remains, from lapse of time, or other causes, have not been identified. “Requiescant in pace._”