I have known the briefest summer flowers outlive them.' 'I grieve to hear it,' said the child.
'Ah! so say the gentlefolks who come down here to look about them,' returned the old man, shaking his head, 'but I say otherwise.

"It's a pretty custom you have in this part of the country," they say to me sometimes, "to plant the graves, but it's melancholy to see these things all withering or dead." I crave their pardon and tell them that, as I take it, 'tis a good sign for the happiness of the living.

And so it is.

It's nature.' 'Perhaps the mourners learn to look to the blue sky by day, and to the stars by night, and to think that the dead are there, and not in graves,' said the child in an earnest voice.
'Perhaps so,' replied the old man doubtfully.

'It may be.' 'Whether it be as I believe it is, or no,' thought the child within herself, 'I'll make this place my garden.