Set thus austerely aloft, it seems now a survival of the day when
men used to go to meeting gun in hand, and when one stayed, a lookout
by the door, to watch and listen. But this the present dwellers do not
remember. Conceding not a sigh to the holy and strenuous past, they
lament--and the more as they grow older--the stiff climb up the hill,
albeit to rest in so sweet a sanctuary at the top. For it is sweet
indeed. A soft little wind seems always to be stirring there, on summer
Sundays a messenger of good. It runs whispering about, and wafts in all
sorts of odors: honey of the milkweed and wild rose, and a Christmas
tang of the evergreens just below. It carries away something,
too--scents calculated to bewilder the thrift-hunting bee: sometimes a
whiff of peppermint from an old lady's pew, but oftener the breath of
musk and southernwood, gathered in ancient gardens, and borne up here
to embroider the preacher's drowsy homilies, and remind us, when we
faint, of the keen savor of righteousness.
Here in the church do we congregate from week to week; but behind it,
on a sloping hillside, is the last home of us all, the old
burying-ground, overrun with a briery tangle, and relieved by Nature's
sweet and cunning hand from the severe decorum set ordinarily about the
dead.
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