The dead man lay in the rough box like one asleep. There was in his face a peace so profound that the hard, mean, ugly features of this old man seemed to have been remodeled under some marvelous fingers. The minister, with his bad eye, seemed not to observe this transfiguration, but the others marked it and crowded around the coffin. The minister took out his watch, looked at it, and snapped the case. “If you will find seats, we'll begin the service,” he said. “The stranger here seems to have made all necessary preparations for the burial.” The crowd drew back from the coffin, the School-teacher went and sat in the doorway in the sun; the little boy standing up by his knees, the little girl beside him on the doorstep. The minister began a discourse on the horrors of an eternal hell. But the attention of the audience moved past him to the man seated in the door. The harmony, grouping the man and these two children, seemed to enter and fill the room. A certain common sympathy uniting them, as though it were the purity of childhood. The man sitting in the door did not move. He looked out toward the south over a sea of sun washing a shore of tree tops. A vagrant breath of the afternoon moved his brown hair. He seemed not to hear the minister, not to regard the service, but to wait like one infinitely patient with the order of events. When the preacher had finished, the miller, sitting in a chair by the window, rose. “Just before ole Nicholas died,” she said, “he made the doctor promise to git up here at his funeral an' tell everybody that he left all his things to the Schoolteacher. The doctor couldn't come back, so he asked me to git up an' tell it for him.” The minister turned toward the woman. “Left his property to this stranger?” “Yes,” said the woman, “he tried all night to tell the doctor, an' he was mortally afeard that he would die before he could tell it.” The School-teacher was now standing in the door. Beside him, and framing in his body, dust danced in the sun, making a haze of gold. The minister addressed him. “Why did Nicholas Parks leave his possessions to you?” The School-teacher did not reply. He went over to the coffin, lifted the lid and began to fit it on the box. The men standing around the room came forward and took the coffin up. They carried it out of the house, their hands under the bottom of it. The preacher picked up his satchel and followed. Outside he stopped, pointed to the grave in the meadow, and spoke to the School-teacher. “You didn't put that grave where old Nicholas wanted it. He wanted to be buried on the top of the ridge between those two trees. It was a place he had picked out. He told me so at the last quarterly meeting.” The School-teacher lifted his face and looked at the two great hickories marking the spot on the summit of the little meadow. His eyes filled with melancholy shadows, the smile deepened and saddened about his mouth. But he did not reply.