They sent for Persis, but her father was dead before she reached her old home and went weeping over the threshold, leaning on her young husband’s arm. Not a word did she have of blame or forgiveness from her father’s lips; but she knew his last mind towards her when she saw what his work had been since the day she left him. Out in Ichabod Buckley’s workshop stood a tall slate stone, shaped like the one he had erected for his dearly beloved wife. On it were cut his name, and the years of his birth and death, and under that a verse. In his own poor brain, strained almost asunder with its awful stress of one idea in life, he had devised this verse; with his poor old failing hands he had cut it on the stone: “Stranger, view well this speaking stone, And drop a pitying tear; Ingratitude had overthrown, And Death then laid me here.” Ichabod Buckley had left a space below, as if he had designed to make still larger his appeal to the pity of those who should pause in the future by his grave; and thereon did Darius Hopkins, to comfort his wife Persis, who grieved as if she could never be comforted when she read the first, cut another verse. When the stone was set up over Ichabod’s grave, people kneeling before it read, after the piteous complaint and prayer for sympathy of the dead man, Darius’s verse: “Who doth his clearer sight possess In brighter realms above, May come his earthly woe to bless, And know that all was Love.” And it has so happened, because Darius cut with his strong young hands more firmly and deeply his verse in the stone, that his has endured and can be read, while Ichabod’s is all worn away by the rain-storms of the years, as it might have been by the tears of mortal life. EVELINA’S GARDEN On the south a high arbor-vitæ hedge separated Evelina’s garden from the road. The hedge was so high that when the school-children lagged by, and the secrets behind it fired them with more curiosity than those between their battered book covers, the tallest of them by stretching up on tiptoe could not peer over. And so they were driven to childish engineering feats, and would set to work and pick away sprigs of the arbor-vitæ with their little fingers, and make peep-holes--but small ones, that Evelina might not discern them. Then they would thrust their pink faces into the hedge, and the enduring fragrance of it would come to their nostrils like a gust of aromatic breath from the mouth of the northern woods, and peer into Evelina’s garden as through the green tubes of vernal telescopes.