"Grandpapa has broken his neck now!" cried little Pansie, amid her sobs.

"Kiss grandpapa, and make it well, then," said the old gentleman,
recollecting her remedy, and scrambling up more readily than could be
expected. "Well," he murmured to himself, "a hair's-breadth more, and I
should have been tumbled into yonder grave. Poor little Pansie! what
wouldst thou have done then?"

"Make the grass grow over grandpapa," answered Pansie, laughing up in his
face.

"Poh, poh, child, that is not a pretty thing to say," said grandpapa,
pettishly and disappointed, as people are apt to be when they try to
calculate on the fitful sympathies of childhood. "Come, you must go in to
old Martha now."

The poor old gentleman was in the more haste to leave the spot because he
found himself standing right in front of his own peculiar row of
gravestones, consisting of eight or nine slabs of slate, adorned with
carved borders rather rudely cut, and the earliest one, that of his
Bessie, bending aslant, because the frost of so many winters had slowly
undermined it. Over one grave of the row, that of his gifted grandson,
there was no memorial. He felt a strange repugnance, stronger than he had
ever felt before, to linger by these graves, and had none of the tender
sorrow, mingled with high and tender hopes, that had sometimes made it
seem good to him to be there. Such moods, perhaps, often come to the aged,
when the hardened earth-crust over their souls shuts them out from
spiritual influences.