In a great city no man would live willingly close by a cemetery. In such a village as Swardeston the nearness of the graveyard is a consecration. New graves appear among the old ones from time to time. The oldest of these others have faded gently into the grass. Nobody is left to tend them or to remember whose bones they cover. Yet the history of many a family can be traced back for three centuries on the lichen-covered stones. Some day, when the war is over, another grave may be dug in this quiet spot. If the poor mutilated frame of Edith Cavell is ever permitted to be brought back home, her countrymen will come here to look upon the place where she lies. In this October of 1915 she sleeps in a land ravaged by war, and those who killed her will not stoop even to the tardy pity of giving back her body. But in those early seventies the village churchyard was not a place of sadness to the Rectory children. They played hide-and-seek among the sloping tombstones. The church and churchyard were, as they still are, the centre of the village life. Gay doings, such as a wedding, took place under the shadows of the elms and yews. The whole community assembled there on any day of special interest. The churchyard was the Trafalgar Square of Swardeston. For it was not remote from the houses, as many village churchyards are. Norfolk labourers swung their heels on the wall in the long evenings of the days before village institutes and reading rooms were invented. In these early seventies the village talk still harked back sometimes to the War of the French and Prussians. Its politics dealt with such names as “Dizzy” and Gladstone and Joseph Arch, the agricultural reformer--and, what was more to the point, a Norfolk man. In later years the village church saw the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s two Jubilees and King Edward’s Coronation--“a Norfolk landlord, and a rare good ’un,” as they liked to say in Swardeston. CHAPTER II LIFE IN THE RECTORY. Home life in the Rectory was tinged, as was that of most English homes at the time, with Evangelical strictness. On Sunday all books, needlework, and toys were put away. The day began with the learning of collect or Catechism. As soon as the children were big enough they attended services in the morning and afternoon. Evening services were not yet introduced in Swardeston. Light was not cheap, and the way across the country fields to church was no adventure for Sabbath clothes on dark winter nights. Thus the closing hours on Sunday were home hours for Rectory and village. Let those who have no memories of such times scoff if they think fit. A memory is better than a jest.