The Grass Was Wet, As
If With A Hoar Frost That Had Just Been Melted.
I do not know that
ever I saw a morning more autumnal.
As I went to and fro among the
graves, I saw some flowers set reverently before a recently erected
tomb, and drawing near, was almost startled to find they lay on the
grave a man seventy-two years old when he died. We are accustomed
to strew flowers only over the young, where love has been cut short
untimely, and great possibilities have been restrained by death.
We strew them there in token, that these possibilities, in some
deeper sense, shall yet be realised, and the touch of our dead
loves remain with us and guide us to the end. And yet there was
more significance, perhaps, and perhaps a greater consolation, in
this little nosegay on the grave of one who had died old. We are
apt to make so much of the tragedy of death, and think so little of
the enduring tragedy of some men's lives, that we see more to
lament for in a life cut off in the midst of usefulness and love,
than in one that miserably survives all love and usefulness, and
goes about the world the phantom of itself, without hope, or joy,
or any consolation. These flowers seemed not so much the token of
love that survived death, as of something yet more beautiful - of
love that had lived a man's life out to an end with him, and been
faithful and companionable, and not weary of loving, throughout all
these years.
The morning cleared a little, and the sky was once more the old
stone-coloured vault over the sallow meadows and the russet woods,
as I set forth on a dog-cart from Wendover to Tring. The road lay
for a good distance along the side of the hills, with the great
plain below on one hand, and the beech-woods above on the other.
The fields were busy with people ploughing and sowing; every here
and there a jug of ale stood in the angle of the hedge, and I could
see many a team wait smoking in the furrow as ploughman or sower
stepped aside for a moment to take a draught. Over all the brown
ploughlands, and under all the leafless hedgerows, there was a
stout piece of labour abroad, and, as it were, a spirit of picnic.
The horses smoked and the men laboured and shouted and drank in the
sharp autumn morning; so that one had a strong effect of large,
open-air existence. The fellow who drove me was something of a
humourist; and his conversation was all in praise of an
agricultural labourer's way of life. It was he who called my
attention to these jugs of ale by the hedgerow; he could not
sufficiently express the liberality of these men's wages; he told
me how sharp an appetite was given by breaking up the earth in the
morning air, whether with plough or spade, and cordially admired
this provision of nature.
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