The doctor and the village nurse took charge of her; when she was ready for burial, more quiet than earth itself,--one never knows quiet until one sees it so,--I put roses beside her; one of the county ladies keeps me supplied from her conservatory. Yet I hesitated; it seemed wrong to recall in this presence any mere tangible and visible beauty, or aught from the world of things. The lovely contours and outlines, the perfume of the roses reproached me, as if I were pursuing her to bring her back to mere self, hampering her escape. With her we seemed to be swept away into some great consciousness that meant relief from individual sorrow,--sharing her rest, a repose so deep that it rested us for all the days to come. Madge mourned over her as if it were her own mother,--I hardly know why: could it have been merely the three days of trying to care for her? Or was she touched, in some depth of her nature never reached before, by the grandeur of that loneliness? There was a brief service in the little church on the hill, a sound of song, of praying; but nothing in the burial service could quite express the pathos of that moment when we buried some one's mother, not even knowing her name. We left her in the churchyard, within hearing of the stream, where deep shadows fall on grave after grave. This cold winter grass which grows above the other graves will soon, with the quickening of spring, cover hers also; already it is freshening, and crocuses peep out here and there. There is no name to put on a stone at her head. It is perhaps at best folly to mark the resting-places of the dead, yet I had a feeling that no token of respect must be lacking, and I begged that an old grey tombstone, standing by the churchyard wall, a stone so old that all that was carved on it has been worn away, might be placed at her head. It has told the passing of one human soul, and shall tell that of another; in its grey, fine-worn beauty it symbolizes the vast impersonality of the end. I come here now even oftener than I used. Surely death has never appeared so gentle, so much a member of the family, as in these English churchyards with their sweet hominess. It seems fitting that we meet "My sister, the Death of the Body" on these grass-grown paths which wear a look of every day and common happenings. The little river, the lichen-grown stones, the sense of long continuance, give one a feeling that there are no gaps, no fissures between life and death, that the sight of the eyes slips inevitably into the vision of the soul. The sky seems near in England, with the crumbling grey of old Norman tower and churchyard wall touching its veiled blue, and the low white clouds almost within reach; the old home-like look of the flat stones makes one feel as if the sleepers are still, as it were, sitting on the threshold, or on the old bench by the door. There is no sense of distance or separation, no feeling of far away.