On the second day of his, or rather _my_ sojourn (I take leave to return
to the first person), there was a notable funeral of an old lady. Her
name was Darby, and her journey to her last home was very considerable,
being made in a hearse, by easy stages, from her house of Lisnabane, in
the county of Sligo, to the church-yard of Chapelizod. There was a great
flat stone over that small parcel of the rector's freehold, which the
family held by a tenure, not of lives, but of deaths, renewable for
ever. So that my uncle, who was a man of an anxious temperament, had
little trouble in satisfying himself of the meerings and identity of
this narrow tenement, to which Lemuel Mattocks, the sexton, led him as
straight and confidently as he could have done to the communion-table.

My uncle, therefore, fiated the sexton's presentment, and the work
commenced forthwith. I don't know whether all boys have the same liking
for horrors which I am conscious of having possessed--I only know that I
liked the churchyard, and deciphering tombstones, and watching the
labours of the sexton, and hearing the old world village talk that often
got up over the relics.

When this particular grave was pretty nearly finished--it lay from east
to west--a lot of earth fell out at the northern side, where an old
coffin had lain, and good store of brown dust and grimy bones, and the
yellow skull itself came tumbling about the sexton's feet. These
fossils, after his wont, he lifted decently with the point of his
shovel, and pitched into a little nook beside the great mound of mould
at top.

'Be the powers o' war! here's a battered head-piece for yez,' said young
Tim Moran, who had picked up the cranium, and was eyeing it curiously,
turning it round the while.