death had not made them a whit more genial than they were in life. But
the children were of a temper to be more encouraged by the good-natured
smiles of the puffy cherubs, than frightened or disturbed by the sour
Puritans.

This graveyard (about which we shall say not a word more than may
sooner or later be needful) was the most ancient in the town. The clay
of the original settlers had been incorporated with the soil; those
stalwart Englishmen of the Puritan epoch, whose immediate ancestors had
been planted forth with succulent grass and daisies for the sustenance
of the parson's cow, round the low-battlemented Norman church towers in
the villages of the fatherland, had here contributed their rich Saxon
mould to tame and Christianize the wild forest earth of the new world.
In this point of view--as holding the bones and dust of the primeval
ancestor--the cemetery was more English than anything else in the
neighborhood, and might probably have nourished English oaks and
English elms, and whatever else is of English growth, without that
tendency to spindle upwards and lose their sturdy breadth, which is
said to be the ordinary characteristic both of human and vegetable
productions when transplanted hither. Here, at all events, used to be
some specimens of common English garden flowers, which could not be
accounted for,--unless, perhaps, they had sprung from some English
maiden's heart, where the intense love of those homely things, and
regret of them in the foreign land, had conspired together to keep
their vivifying principle, and cause its growth after the poor girl was
buried. Be that as it might, in this grave had been hidden from sight
many a broad, bluff visage of husbandman, who had been taught to plough
among the hereditary furrows that had been ameliorated by the crumble
of ages: much had these sturdy laborers grumbled at the great roots
that obstructed their toil in these fresh acres. Here, too, the sods