a care, for he is playing with the lock.




CHAPTER III. OLD MORTALITY


I


THERE is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a
prison, on the other by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, under
a steep cliff, it beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and
the scream of the engine and the shock of meeting buffers mount to
it all day long. The aisles are lined with the inclosed sepulchres
of families, door beyond door, like houses in a street; and in the
morning the shadow of the prison turrets, and of many tall
memorials, fall upon the graves. There, in the hot fits of youth,
I came to be unhappy. Pleasant incidents are woven with my memory
of the place. I here made friends with a plain old gentleman, a
visitor on sunny mornings, gravely cheerful, who, with one eye upon
the place that awaited him, chirped about his youth like winter
sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel once, for some days
together, dumbly flirted with me from a window and kept my wild
heart flying; and once - she possibly remembers - the wise Eugenia
followed me to that austere inclosure. Her hair came down, and in
the shelter of the tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair
the braid. But for the most part I went there solitary and, with
irrevocable emotion, pored on the names of the forgotten. Name