mechanically to the door to gaze out, knowing that her tired man will
come in no more to take his customary place and listen to all the things
she has stored up in her mind during the day to tell him; and when the
tired labourer comes in at dusk to find no old wife waiting to give him
his tea and talk to him while he refreshes himself, he all at once
realizes his position; he finds himself cut off from the entire world,
from all of his kind. Where are they all? The enduring sympathy of that
one soul that was with him till now had kept him in touch with life, had
made it seem unchanged and unchangeable, and with that soul has vanished
the old, sweet illusion as well as all ties, all common, human
affection. He is desolate, indeed, alone in a desert world, and it is
not strange that in many and many a case, even in that of a man still
strong, untouched by disease and good for another decade or two, the
loss, the awful solitude, has proved too much for him.

Such cases, I have said, are common, but they are not recorded, though
it is possible with labour to pick them out in the church registers; but
in the churchyards you do not find them, since the farm-labourer has
only a green mound to mark the spot where he lies. Nevertheless, he is
sometimes honoured with a gravestone, and last August I came by chance
on one on which was recorded a case like that of Isaac Bawcombe and his
life-mate.

The churchyard is in one of the prettiest and most secluded villages in
the downland country described in this book. The church is ancient and
beautiful and interesting in many ways, and the churchyard, too, is one
of the most interesting I know, a beautiful, green, tree-shaded spot,
with an extraordinary number of tombs and gravestones, many of them
dated in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, inscribed with names
of families which have long died out.