THE MEETING.
LITTLE dreaming of the happiness in store for him, Charlie, having gathered in his harvest and husked his corn, now occupied himself in preparing to put a hedge around his mother’s grave.
A hedge. How significant that word to him, reared amid the vales of Lincolnshire! It recalled all the associations of his childhood, and of the sunny spring mornings, when, sitting beneath the shelter of the hedge-rows, he watched the ducks sport in the pools below, while beside him the hens were scratching and burrowing in the warm earth beneath the bank for worms and grubs, and he, a happy, careless boy, was pounding a willow stick on his knee with the handle of his knife, to make the bark slip, for a whistle; listening to the birds in the hedge above him, and watching the mimic waves produced by the wind as it swept over the osiers.
His intention was to surround the little promontory (around whose sides murmur the clear waters of the brook and the majestic elm that shadows it, whose pendent branches, with their extremities, approached within a few feet of the grave-stone) with hedge.
Mr. Welch, several years before, had imported plants from England, and also ivy. It was from him he expected to obtain his plants—“quicks” Charlie called them—for he was no novice in hedging. The ivy he purposed to plant at the roots of the great elm.
This occupation had revived all the associations of his boyhood, and fond recollections of other days, often bringing tears to his eyes.
“A beautiful land is England,” said he, as he wiped the sweat from his brow and rested upon his spade; “and those sweet spots in the fens I shall never forget; but this is sweeter, for it is my own. What I do here, I do for myself, my wife, and little one.”
That evening, as he sat with the babe in his lap, while his wife was clearing off the supper table, he said to her, “Mary, it don’t seem to look, or to be, just right that I should have a grave-stone for my mother, and none for my father, brother, and sister.”
“But they are not buried here. You wouldn’t wish to put stones where there are no bodies.”
“But I might have something. I’ve seen in the churchyards at home monuments with the names of people on them who were not buried under them, but had died at sea, or been killed in battle, as father was. I might do that.”