"No," said Doctor Grimshawe; "when my patients have done with me, I
leave them to you and the old Nick, and never trouble myself about them
more. What I want to know is, why you have taken upon you to steal a
man's grave, after he has had immemorial possession of it. By what
right have you dug up this bed, undoing the work of a predecessor of
yours, who has long since slept in one of his own furrows?"

"Why, Doctor," said the grave-digger, looking quietly into the
cavernous pit which he had hollowed, "it is against common sense that a
dead man should think to keep a grave to himself longer than till you
can take up his substance in a shovel. It would be a strange thing
enough, if, when living families are turned out of their homes twice or
thrice in a generation, (as they are likely to be in our new
government,) a dead man should think he must sleep in one spot till the
day of judgment. No; turn about, I say, to these old fellows. As long
as they can decently be called dead men, I let them lie; when they are
nothing but dust, I just take leave to stir them on occasion. This is
the way we do things under the republic, whatever your customs be in
the old country."

"Matters are very much the same in any old English churchyard," said
the English stranger. "But, my good friend, I have come three thousand
miles, partly to find this grave, and am a little disappointed to find
my labor lost."

"Ah! and you are the man my father was looking for," said the grave-
digger, nodding his head at Mr. Hammond. "My father, who was a grave-
digger afore me, died four and thirty years ago, when we were under the
King; and says he, 'Ebenezer, do not you turn up a sod in this spot,