One early spring morning, about twenty years before, a man going to his
work at sunrise through the churchyard, stopped by a flat stone which
he had lately helped to lay down. The day before, a name had been cut
on it, which he stayed to read; and below the name some one had
scrawled a few words in pencil, which he read also--_Pitifully behold
the sorrows of our hearts_. On the stone lay a pencil, and a few feet
from it lay the Doctor, face downwards, as he had lain all night, with
the hoar frost on his black hair.

Ah! these grave-stones (they were ugly things in those days; not the
light, hopeful, pretty crosses we set up now), how they seem
remorselessly to imprison and keep our dear dead friends away from us!
And yet they do not lie with a feather's weight upon the souls that are
gone, while GOD only knows how heavily they press upon the souls that
are left behind. Did the spirit whose body was with the dead, stand
that morning by the body whose spirit was with the dead, and pity him?
Let us only talk about what we know.

After this it was said that the Doctor had got a fever, and was dying,
but he got better of it; and then that he was out of his mind, but he
got better of that, and came out looking much as usual, except that his
hair never seemed quite so black again, as if a little of that night's
hoar frost still remained. And no further misfortune happened to him
that I ever heard of; and as time went on he grew a beard, and got
stout, and kept a German poodle, and gave tea-parties to other people's
children. As to the grave-stone story, whatever it was to him at the
end of twenty years, it was a great convenience to his friends; for
when he said anything they didn't agree with, or did anything they
couldn't understand, or didn't say or do what was expected of him, what