The dead lay at rest in their boxes and thanked God they were quiet and
had found everlasting peace.

And one day even this, for which they had patiently endured life, was
taken from them.

The village was picturesque and there was none quite like it, even in
Finisterre. Artists discovered it and made it famous. After the artists
followed the tourists, and the old creaking _diligence_ became an
absurdity. Brittany was the fashion for three months of the year, and
wherever there is fashion there is at least one railway. The one built
to satisfy the thousands who wished to visit the wild, sad beauties of
the west of France was laid along the road beside the little cemetery
of this tale.

It takes a long while to awaken the dead. These heard neither the
voluble working-men nor even the first snort of the engine. And, of
course, they neither heard nor knew of the pleadings of the old priest
that the line should be laid elsewhere. One night he came out into the
old cemetery and sat on a grave and wept. For he loved his dead and felt
it to be a tragic pity that the greed of money, and the fever of travel,
and the petty ambitions of men whose place was in the great cities where
such ambitions were born, should shatter forever the holy calm of those
who had suffered so much on earth. He had known many of them in life,
for he was very old; and although he believed, like all good Catholics,
in heaven and purgatory and hell, yet he always saw his friends as he
had buried them, peacefully asleep in their coffins, the souls lying
with folded hands like the bodies that held them, patiently awaiting the
final call. He would never have told you, this good old priest, that he
believed heaven to be a great echoing palace in which God and the