We should not have been human if we had not advanced with a Hamlet-Horatio air: "Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making ?" We found our four friends in a space of the churchyard from which the tombstones had been temporarily removed, engaged, not with mattock and death's head, but with spirit-level and measuring-cord.

They were levelling a stretch of newly-turned and smoothed ground, and they pointed with pride to the portion of the work already accomplished, serried rows of spick-and-span headstones, all "plumb," as they explained, and freshly scraped--not a sign of caressing moss or a tendril of vine to be seen.

A neat job, if there ever was one.

We should have seen the yard before they had taken it in hand! There wasn't a stone that was straight, and the weeds and the brambles--well, look at it now.

We looked.