"Pendrill," said I to myself--"who's he?" and, ashamed of my ignorance of a person so eulogised, I inquired of Mrs. D. if she knew anyone of that name. She said there was a man named Pennybill who used to sell Ostend rabbits in Shepherd's Market, but he hadn't been dead long enough for his tomb to have got so dirty. As she spoke, enlightenment came. Ostend, Holland, the battle of Worcester, Charles II, and yes, on the other side of the tomb was the inscription to Richard Pendrill, the preserver of the life of Charles II. What an odd, unexpected link with the past that forgotten old tomb made, standing solitary amidst the sooty shrubs in the cat-haunted churchyard! The escape of Charles from Worcester to Shoreham, where he found a coal boat that carried him over to Normandy, might well be a page out of some romance for all one realises it, as a rule. There are times when I share Mrs. D.'s scepticism about the past, and Charles, Cromwell, Queen Elizabeth, Henry VIII and the Gunpowder Plot, wars, plagues, and fires are just so many incidents in a story book. Then I stumble on an ancient tombstone with such an inscription as this, almost obliterated by the winds and rains, the frosts and heats of centuries, or I open Pepys and read how, on 27th February, 1659, the old chap was "Up in the morning, and had some red herrings to our breakfast, while my boot-heel was a-mending, by the same token that the boy left the hole as it was before," and I say to myself with the shock of coming up bump against something solid where one had anticipated vacancy, "Then it _was_ all true!" The church was closed, but we found the "Resurrection Gateway," where it rears itself in dignified isolation above the iron railings on the western side of the church. There is, over it, a curious carving in oak of the "Last Judgment," depicting that day when long-dead citizens, endowed with renewed strength, will throw off their earthen trammels, and shouldering their tombstones with the ease of a Samson, rise to disclose those secret thoughts and deeds which the kindly grave had hidden for centuries. Mrs. Darling remarked that, for her part, she had no fear of death or judgment. "If I wos to go to bed this night and never git up no more," she stated, "there ain't a livin' soul can say I owe them a brass farthin'. I never done one er my fellow creatures a hinjury, and there's the things all ready to lay me out in the bottom drawer near the washstand." She flourished the paper bag containing the hat shape with an air of conscious virtue, but I could not emulate her action with the flat iron, which weighed seven pounds! To tell the truth, I was looking out for a friendly tombstone behind which that article, together with the saucepan lids, could be conveniently lost, but some children playing in the churchyard were watching me as if they suspected my designs, and I had to abandon the idea.