A soft Scotch rain had been falling while we talked, but now slackened; and a misty beam of sunlight pierced the clouds low-piled in the west. Its pale gold lit up Bobby’s resting-place, under-scoring, as it were, the epitaph just spoken, then glanced along the gray front of the church, and brought into relief an ancient slab, where a skeleton, fantastically poised, appeared to be keeping guard. A little robin hopped lightly to a bush in the flower-bed, whence soon its clear vespers thrilled the air. Death was there, alas! yet overcome by life; since love is the only real life, and by right of loving Bobby lives forever.
II.
A SELECT COMPANY.
II.
A SELECT COMPANY.
In the Life and Correspondence of the Rev. Lyman Beecher, under the far-away date of 1819, is this item:
“Last week was interred Tom junior, with funeral honors, by the side of old Tom of happy memory. What a fatal mortality there is among the cats of the Parsonage! Our Harriet is chief mourner always at their funerals. She asked for what she called an epithet for the gravestone of Tom junior, which I gave as follows:
‘Here lies our kit,
Who had a fit,