little patch of ground beneath our feet, they swing out before us and
beckon daily to us new hells and new heavens in our eyes.




CHAPTER III

THE MACHINE SCARE


I have had occasion nearly every day for the past two weeks to pass by
an ancient churchyard on a great hillside not far from London. Most of
the stones are very old, and seem to have been thoughtfully and
reverently, flake by flake, wrought into their final form by
long-vanished hands. As I stand and watch them, with the yews and
cypresses flocking round them, it is as if in some sort of way they had
been surely wrought by the hand of love, so full are they of grief and
of joy, of devotion, of the very singing of the dead and of those who
loved them.

When I walk on a little farther, and come to a small and new addition to
the churchyard, and look about me at the stones, I find myself suddenly
in quite a new company. So far as one could observe, looking at the
gravestones in the new churchyard, the people who died there died rather
thoughtlessly and mechanically, and as if nobody cared very much. Of
course, when one thinks a little further, one knows that this cannot be
true, and that the men and the women who gathered by these glib, trim,
capable-looking modern tombstones were as full of love and tenderness
and reverence before their dead as the others were--but the lines on the