Their hearts were as dying within them; their eyes strayed over the land and up to the grey sky, begging for mercy. Their faces had grown pale with the strain on their emotions; trembling had taken hold of them; and more than one whispered his prayers out of livid lips, with fervent sighs and beatings of the breast, and hearty repentance of sin. And over them all loured that heavy sense of irreparable loss, and a feeling of immense woe, bringing forth most searching desolating thoughts, so that they could not but give way and mourn aloud. They mused on the inevitable fate of man; on the fruitlessness of all his endeavours; on the utter vanity of his life, his joys, his possessions, his hopes—all mere smoke, dust, illusion, nothingness!—on his folly in setting himself above any creature whatsoever—he that is a mere whiff of wind that comes none knows whence, blows none knows why, goes none knows whither; or the impossibility—were a man lord of the whole world, and enjoying all imaginable pleasures—of avoiding death: and wherefore, then, doth the soul of man drag with it this torpid body? To what purpose doth man live? Such were the meditations of the people, as they walked in procession, gazing around upon the verdant fields with looks of sorrow unutterable, faces set hard and souls shuddering within them. But nevertheless, they knew well that their refuge—their sole refuge—was in the infinite goodness and mercy of the Lord. “_Secundum magnam misericordiam tuam!_”... The mysterious Latin words fell upon their hearts like clods of frost-baked earth; and as they walked on, they bowed their heads instinctively to the sounds, as men must bow to the inexorable scythe of death. Now they felt absolutely resigned to all that might come—as indifferent as those rocks they saw cropping out of the fields close by them, in their hard grey strength; or the fallows and flowery meadows, and the mighty trees which may at any time be blasted by the thunderbolt, and yet which raise their heads to Heaven boldly, with a silent song of gladsome life! Thus they traversed all the village, each one so lost in serious thoughts that he felt as if alone in a boundless desert, and seeing with his mind’s eye all his forefathers borne to the churchyard, visible through the great poplar trunks. And now, to the dreary tolling of the bells, it came in full sight, rising out of the corn with its clumps of trees, its crosses and its graves, opening before them that terrible insatiable abyss into which all the generations were slowly dropping. Peering through the air, dim with rain, they fancied they could see coffins borne from every hut, funeral trains crawling along every road, and everybody weeping, lamenting, sobbing for the loss of some dear one, till the world was full of mourning, and drowned in bitter tears.