For a moment he stood looking silently down upon the marble slab with its defaced lettering. Of the wordy epitaph which had once redounded to the honour of the bones beneath there remained only the words "who departed," but he read these with a long abstracted gaze. "Let me see," he said at last, speaking with his accustomed dignity. "Did you ever go to school, Nicholas?" "Yes, sir." "When?" "I went 'most three winters, sir, but I had to leave off on o'count o' pa's not havin' any hand 'cep'n me." The judge smiled. "Ah, well," he returned. "We'll see if you can't begin again. My boy has a tutor, you know, and his playmates come to study with him. He's about your age, and it will give you a start. Come in to-morrow at nine, and we'll talk it over. No, don't get up. I am going." And he passed out of the churchyard, closing the heavy gate with a metallic clang. Nicholas lay on the marble slab, but the book slipped from his hands, and he gazed straight before him at the oriel window, where the ivy was tremulous with the shining bodies and clamorous voices of nesting sparrows. They darted swiftly from gable to gable, filling the air with shrill sounds of discord, and endowing with animation the inanimate pile, wrapping the dead bricks in a living shroud. On the other side swept the long, colourless grasses, rippling in faint waves like a still lake that reflects the sunshine and swaying lightly beneath myriads of gauzy-winged bees that flashed with a droning noise from blade to blade, to find rest in the yellow hearts of the damask roses. Across the white vaults and the low-lying marble slabs innumerable shadows chased, and from above the gnarled old locust trees swept a fringe of vivid green, the slender blossoms hanging in tassels from the branches' ends, and filling the air with a soft and ceaseless rain of fragrant petals. Pale as the ghosts of dead leaves, they fell always, fluttering night and day from the twisted boughs, settling in creamy flakes upon the bending grasses, and outlining in delicate tracery the epitaphs upon the discoloured marbles.