'Oh no,' I said, eating what seemed to be the most perfect rusk ever produced by German baker, 'not actually.'
'What a sweet spot this is to be buried in,' remarked Mrs. Harvey-Browne, while Brosy, with the skill of one used to doing it, made the tea; and then according to the wont of good women when they speak of being buried, she sighed. 'I wonder,' she went on, 'how he came to be put here.'
'That is what I have been wondering ever since I found him,' I said.
'He was wounded in some battle and was trying to get home,' said Brosy. 'You know Finland was Swedish in those days, and so was Rügen.'
As I did not know I said nothing, but looked exceedingly bright.
'He had been fighting for Sweden against the French. I met a forester yesterday, and he told me there used to be a forester's house where those fruit trees are, and the people in it took him in and nursed him till he died. Then they buried him here.'
'But why was he not buried in a churchyard?' asked his mother.
'I don't know. Poor chap, I don't suppose he would have cared. The great point I should say under such circumstances would be the being dead.'
'My dear Brosy,' murmured his mother; which was what she always murmured when he said things that she disapproved without quite knowing why.
'Or a still greater point,' I remarked, moved again to cheerful speech by the excellent tea Brosy had made, and his mother, justly suspicious of the tea of Teutons, had smuggled through the customs, as she afterwards told me with pride,—'a still greater point if those are the circumstances that lie in wait for one, would be the never being born.'