passed through the same world. To him it was a new heaven and a
new earth, for he carried with him a new soul.

Crossing the stretch of hill on the crest of which lay the
Rehoboth burial-ground, Moses made his way to the stone wall
fencing in that God's acre, and paused to lean his arms on its
rude and irregular coping. There stood the old chapel, square and
gaunt, its dark outline clearly cut against the moonlit sky, each
window coldly gleaming in the pale light, while the scattered
headstones, sheeted in mist, stood out like groups of mourners
mute in their sorrow over the dead. Below lay the village--that
little tragic centre of life and death--half its inhabitants in
sleep, hushed for a few brief hours in their humble moorland
nests. The fall of waters from the weir at the Bridge Factory came
up from the valley in dreamy cadences; a light dimly burned in old
Joseph's window; and a meteor swept with a mighty arc the western
sky. The soul of Moses Fletcher was at peace.

He sprang with a light step over the low wall of boundary, and
crossed the wave-like mounds that heaved as a grassy sea, and
beneath which lay the unlettered dead, the long grasses writhing
and clinging to his feet, as though loath to let him escape the
dust upon which they fed and grew so rank. Heedless of their
greedy embrace, he walked with long stride towards the lower end
of the yard, until he stood before a gray and lichen-covered slab,
on which were letters old and new. There, by the moonlight, he
read the record of a baby boy of two, carrying back the reader
forty years. Above it was the name of a father, dead these ten
years, and between these, all newly cut, were the lines: