Flowery as Sicilian meads was the parsonage garden on that quiet afternoon late in May, when Mr. Hammond closed the honeysuckle- crowned gate, crossed the street, and walked slowly into the church- yard, down the sacred streets of the silent city of the dead, and entered the enclosure where slept his white-robed household band.
The air was thick with perfume, as if some strong, daring south wind had blown wide the mystic doors of Astarte's huge laboratory, and overturned the myriad alembics, and deluged the world with her fragrant and subtle distillations.
Honey-burdened bees hummed their hymns to labor, as they swung to and fro; and numbers of Psyche-symbols, golden butterflies, floated dreamily in and around and over the tombs, now and then poising on velvet wings, as if waiting, listening for the clarion voice of Gabriel, to rouse and reanimate the slumbering bodies beneath the gleaming slabs. Canary-colored orioles flitted in and out of the trailing willows, a redbird perched on the brow of a sculptured angel guarding a child's grave, and poured his sad, sweet, monotonous notes on the spicy air; two purple pigeons, with rainbow necklaces, cooed and fluttered up and down from the church belfry, and close under the projecting roof of the granite vault, a pair of meek brown wrens were building their nest and twittering softly one to another.
The pastor cut down the rank grass and fringy ferns, the flaunting weeds and coreopsis that threatened to choke his more delicate flowers, and, stooping, tied up the crimson pinks, and wound the tendrils of the blue-veined clematis around its slender trellis, and straightened the white petunias and the orange-tinted crocaes, which the last heavy shower had beaten to the ground.
The small, gray vault was overrun with ivy, whose dark, polished leaves threatened to encroach on a plain slab of pure marble that stood very near it; and as the minister pruned away the wreaths, his eyes rested on the black letters in the centre of the slab: "Murray Hammond. Aged 21."
Elsewhere the sunshine streamed warm and bright over the graves, but here the rays were intercepted by the church, and its cool shadow rested over vault and slab and flowers.
The old man was weary from stooping so long, and now he took off his hat and passed his hand over his forehead, and sighed as he leaned against the door of the vault, where fine, fairy-fingered mosses were weaving their green arabesque immortelles.
In a mournfully measured, yet tranquil tone, he said aloud: "Ah! truly throughout all the years of my life I have never heard the promise of perfect love, without seeing aloft amongst the stars, fingers as of a man's hand, writing the sacred legend: 'Ashes to ashes! dust to dust!'"