become indistinguishable on the older stones, the graves are dug over
again, and filled with new occupants and covered with new stones, or
perhaps with the old ones newly inscribed.

Closely connected with the church was the clergyman's house, a
comfortable-looking residence; and likewise in the churchyard, with
tombstones all about it, even almost at the threshold, so that the
doorstep itself might have been a tombstone, was another house, of
respectable size and aspect. We surmised that this might be the sexton's
dwelling, but it proved not to be so; and a woman, answering our knock,
directed us to the place where he might be found. So Mr. Bradford and I
went in search of him, leaving S----- seated on a tombstone. The sexton
was a jolly-looking, ruddy-faced man, a mechanic of some sort,
apparently, and he followed us to the churchyard with much alacrity. We
found S----- standing at a gateway, which opened into the most ancient,
and now quite ruinous, part of the church, the present edifice covering
much less ground than it did some centuries ago. We went through this
gateway, and found ourselves in an enclosure of venerable walls, open to
the sky, with old Norman arches standing about, beneath the loftiest of
which the sexton told us the high altar used to stand. Of course, there
were weeds and ivy growing in the crevices, but not so abundantly as I
have seen them elsewhere. The sexton pointed out a piece of a statue
that had once stood in one of the niches, and which he himself, I think,
had dug up from several feet below the earth; also, in a niche of the
walls, high above our heads, he showed us an ancient wooden coffin, hewn
out of a solid log of oak, the hollow being made rudely in the shape of a
human figure. This too had been dug up, and nobody knew how old it was.
While we looked at all this solemn old trumpery, the curate, quite a
young man, stood at the back door of his house, elevated considerably
above the ruins, with his young wife (I presume) and a friend or two,