species varied with the season of the year. But this was the very
poetry of the profession. The others whom I knew were somewhat
dry. A faint flavour of the gardener hung about them, but
sophisticated and dis-bloomed. They had engagements to keep, not
alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with man-
kind's clocks and hour-long measurement of time. And thus there
was no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long gossip,
foot on spade. They were men wrapped up in their grim business;
they liked well to open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the
key and throwing wide the grating; and they carried in their minds
a calendar of names and dates. It would be "in fifty-twa" that
such a tomb was last opened for "Miss Jemimy." It was thus they
spoke of their past patients -familiarly but not without respect,
like old family servants. Here is indeed a servant, whom we forget
that we possess; who does not wait at the bright table, or run at
the bell's summons, but patiently smokes his pipe beside the
mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the burials of
our race. To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a superficial
touch savours of paradox; yet he was surely in error when he
attributed insensibility to the digger of the grave. But perhaps
it is on Hamlet that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English
sexton differs from the Scotch. The "goodman delver," reckoning up
his years of office, might have at least suggested other thoughts.
It is a pride common among sextons. A cabinet-maker does not count
his cabinets, nor even an author his volumes, save when they stare
upon him from the shelves; but the grave-digger numbers his graves.
He would indeed be something different from human if his solitary
open-air and tragic labours left not a broad mark upon his mind.
There, in his tranquil aisle, apart from city clamour, among the
cats and robins and the ancient effigies and legends of the tomb,