CHAPTER III.
STEPHEN'S FIRST VICTORY.
James Fern did not live many more days, and he was buried the Sunday following his death.

All the colliers and pitmen from Botfield walked with the funeral of their old comrade and made a great burial of it.

The parish church was two miles on the other side of Botfield, and four miles from Fern's Hollow; so James Fern and his family had never, as he called it, 'troubled' the church with their attendance.

All the household, even to little Nan, went with their father's corpse, to bury it in the strange and distant churchyard.

Stephen felt as if he was in some long and painful dream, as he sat in the cart, with his feet resting upon his father's coffin, with his grandfather on a chair at the head, nodding and laughing at every jolt on the rough road, and Martha holding a handkerchief up to her face, and carrying a large umbrella over herself and little Nan, to keep the dust off their new black bonnets.