Tale the Ninth.
DELIA GRIMWET.
DELIA GRIMWET.
To an ordinary observer, nothing could be more commonplace than Kempton, a decrepit little apology for a village, lying on the coast of Maine. Properly speaking, however, no sea-port can be utterly commonplace, with its suggestion of the mystery of the sea, the ships, the sailors who have been to far lands, the glimpses of unwritten tragedies on every hand. But among sea-side villages Kempton was surely dull enough, and dry enough, and lifeless enough,—as if the sea-winds had sucked its vitality, leaving it empty and pallid and juiceless, like the cockle-shells which bleached upon its sandy beaches.
Yet Kempton had one peculiarity which marked it as singular among all New England towns. It had a woman to dig its graves.
Its one church stood stark and doleful upon the hill at whose foot lay the rotting wharves; and back from the church stretched the church-yard in which the Kempton dead took their long repose, scarcely more monotonous than their colorless lives. The sexton, digging their last resting-places in the ochery loam, might look far off toward the sea where they had wrested from the grudging waters a scanty subsistence; and the dead wives, if so be that their ears were yet sentient, might lie at night and hear below the beat of the waves which afar had rolled over the unmarked graves of their sailor husbands.