Do you guess the
reason?'
'No,' the child replied.
'Because the memory of those who lie below, passes away so soon.
At first they tend them, morning, noon, and night; they soon begin
to come less frequently; from once a day, to once a week; from once
a week to once a month; then, at long and uncertain intervals;
then, not at all. Such tokens seldom flourish long. 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.
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