archangels dwelt alone waiting for that great day when the elected dead
should rise and enter the Presence together, for he was a simple old man
who had read and thought little; but he had a zigzag of fancy in his
humble mind, and he saw his friends and his ancestors' friends as I have
related to you, soul and body in the deep undreaming sleep of death, but
sleep, not a rotted body deserted by its affrighted mate; and to all who
sleep there comes, sooner or later, the time of awakening.

He knew that they had slept through the wild storms that rage on the
coast of Finisterre, when ships are flung on the rocks and trees crash
down in the Bois d'Amour. He knew that the soft, slow chantings of the
_pardon_ never struck a chord in those frozen memories, meagre and
monotonous as their store had been; nor the bagpipes down in the open
village hall--a mere roof on poles--when the bride and her friends
danced for three days without a smile on their sad brown faces.

All this the dead had known in life and it could not disturb nor
interest them now. But that hideous intruder from modern civilization, a
train of cars with a screeching engine, that would shake the earth which
held them and rend the peaceful air with such discordant sounds that
neither dead nor living could sleep! His life had been one long unbroken
sacrifice, and he sought in vain to imagine one greater, which he would
cheerfully assume could this disaster be spared his dead.

But the railway was built, and the first night the train went screaming
by, shaking the earth and rattling the windows of the church, he went
out and sprinkled every grave with holy-water.

And thereafter, twice a day, at dawn and at night, as the train tore a
noisy tunnel in the quiet air, like the plebeian upstart it was, he