There are times when, amid scenes such as the present, one can almost forget the possible, and wish that the silence were less deep. The most contemplative of modern poets, in giving voice to a similar wish, has sublimed it into poetry. “Would,” he says of his churchyard among the hills, in the stanza I have already employed as a motto, “Would that the silent earth Of what it holds could speak, and every grave Be as a volume, shut, yet capable Of yielding its contents to ear and eye.” The dead of a thousand years are sleeping at our feet; the poor peasant serf of ten centuries ago, whom the neighbouring baron could have hung up at his cottage door, with the intelligent mechanic of yesterday, who took so deep an interest in the emancipation of the negroes. What strange stories of the past, what striking illustrations of the destiny and nature of man, how important a chronicle of the progress of society, would this solitary spot present us with, were it not that, like the mysterious volume in the Apocalypse, no man can open the book or unloose the seals thereof! There are recollections associated with some of the more recent graves, of interest enough to show us how curious a record the history of the whole would have furnished. It is now well-nigh thirty years since Willie Watson returned, after an absence of nearly a quarter of a century, to the neighbouring town. He had been employed as a ladies’ shoemaker in some of the districts of the south; but no one at home had heard of Willie in the interval, and there was little known regarding him at his return, except that when he had quitted town so many years before, he was a neat-handed industrious workman, and what the elderly people called a quiet decent lad. And he was now, though somewhat in the wane of life, even a more thorough master of his trade than before. He was quiet and unobtrusive, too, as ever, and a great reader of serious books. And so the better sort of the people were beginning to draw to Willie by a kind of natural sympathy; some of them had learned to saunter into his workshop in the long evenings, and some had grown bold enough to engage him in serious conversation when they met with him in his solitary walks; when out came the astounding fact--and important as it may seem, the simple-minded mechanic had taken no pains to conceal it--that, during his residence in the south country, he had laid down Presbyterianism, and become the member of a Baptist church. There was a sudden revulsion of feeling towards him, and all the people of the town began to speak of Willie Watson as “a poor lost lad.”