As the two women came up to it, one of them kneeled down on the wet grass and looked long and silently through the clouded shade, while the second stood above her, gently oscillating to and fro to lull the muling baby.

I was struck a great way off with something religious in the attitude of these two unkempt and haggard women; and I drew near faster, but still cautiously, to hear what they were saying.

Surely on them the spirit of death and decay had descended; I had no education to dread here: should I not have a chance of seeing nature?
Alas! a pawnbroker could not have been more practical and commonplace, for this was what the kneeling woman said to the woman upright--this and nothing more: 'Eh, what extravagance!' O nineteenth century, wonderful art thou indeed--wonderful, but wearisome in thy stale and deadly uniformity.

Thy men are more like numerals than men.

They must bear their idiosyncrasies or their professions written on a placard about their neck, like the scenery in Shakespeare's theatre.
Thy precepts of economy have pierced into the lowest ranks of life; and there is now a decorum in vice, a respectability among the disreputable, a pure spirit of Philistinism among the waifs and strays of thy Bohemia.
For lo! thy very gravediggers talk politics; and thy castaways kneel upon new graves, to discuss the cost of the monument and grumble at the improvidence of love.
Such was the elegant apostrophe that I made as I went out of the gates again, happily satisfied in myself, and feeling that I alone of all whom I had seen was able to profit by the silent poem of these green mounds and blackened headstones.
IV.