A few short weeks went by, and Willie had gone the way of all flesh. There was silence in his shop, and his flowers opened their breasts to the sun, and bent their heads to the bee and the butterfly, with no one to take note of their beauty, or to sympathize in the delight of the little winged creatures that seemed so happy among them. There was many a wistful eye cast at the closed door and melancholy shutters by the members of Willie’s congregation, and they could all point out his grave. Yonder it lies, in the red light of the setting sun, with a carpeting of soft yellow moss spread over it. This little recess contains, doubtless, to use Wordsworth’s figure, many a curious and many an instructive volume, and all we lack is the ability of deciphering the characters; but a better or more practical treatise on toleration than that humble grave, it cannot contain. The point has often been argued in this part of the country--argued by men with long beards, who preached bad grammar in behalf of Johanna Southcote, and by men who spoke middling good sense for other purposes, and shaved once a day. But of all the arguments ever promulgated, those which told with best effect on the town’s-people were the life and death of Willie Watson, “the poor lost lad.” [Sidenote: A BALLAD IN PROSE.] We have perused the grave of the “poor lost lad,” and it turns out to be a treatise on toleration. The grave beside it may be regarded as a ballad--a short plaintive ballad--moulded in as common a form of invention, if I may so express myself, as any, even the simplest, of those old artless compositions which have welled out from time to time from among the people. Indeed, so simple is the story of it, that we might almost deem it an imitation, were we not assured that all the volumes of this solitary recess are originals from beginning to end.