At one a girl sat singing merrily with her back to the graveyard; and from another came the shrill tones of a scolding woman.

Every here and there was a town garden full of sickly flowers, or a pile of crockery inside upon the window-seat.

But you do not grasp the full connection between these houses of the dead and the living, the unnatural marriage of stately sepulchres and squalid houses, till, lower down, where the road has sunk far below the surface of the cemetery, and the very roofs are scarcely on a level with its wall, you observe that a proprietor has taken advantage of a tall monument and trained a chimney-stack against its back.

It startles you to see the red, modern pots peering over the shoulder of the tomb.
A man was at work on a grave, his spade clinking away the drift of bones that permeates the thin brown soil; but my first disappointment had taught me to expect little from Greyfriars' sextons, and I passed him by in silence.

A slater on the slope of a neighbouring roof eyed me curiously.