"Why, what are you about, old gentleman?" said a man's voice, at length.
"Don't you see?" rejoined the sexton, looking up, "practising the oldest trade in the world but one--digging to be sure--aye, and grave-digging, too, which is a very ancient profession likewise, though when first it began men lived so long, the sextons must have been but poor craftsmen for want of practice."
"And whose grave is it you are digging?" asked the visitor. "I have been here some days, and have not heard of any deaths."
"One would think you were a doctor," answered the sexton, "for you seem to fancy that you must have a hand in every death in the parish--but you want to know whose grave it is--well, I can't tell you, for I don't know myself."
"But who ordered you to dig it then?" demanded the stranger.
"No one," said the sexton; "it will fit somebody, I warrant, and I shall get paid for it; and why should not I keep a ready made grave as a town cobbler keeps ready-made shoes? I am digging it out of my own fancy. There will be death somewhere before the week is out, I am sure; for I dreamed last night that I saw a wedding come to this church, and the bride and the bridegroom stepped on each of the grave hillocks as they walked--so there will be a death, that's certain, and may be two."
"And so you are digging the grave on speculation, old fellow?" exclaimed the other, "but I dare say you have a shrewd guess whom it is for. There is some poor fellow ill in the neighbourhood--or some woman in a bad way, ha?"
"It may be for the young man lying wounded up at Buxton's inn," answered the sexton; "they say he is better; but I should not wonder if it served his turn after all. But I don't know, there is never any telling who may go next. I've seen funny things in my day. Those who thought they had a long lease, find it was a short one: those who were wishing for other people's death, that they might get their money, die first themselves."
The sexton paused, and the stranger did not make any answer, looking gloomily down into the pit as if he did not much like the last reflections that rose up from the bottom of the grave.
"Aye, funny things enough I have seen," continued the sexton, after giving a stroke or two with his pickaxe; "but the funniest of all is, to see how folks take on at first for those who are gone, and how soon they get over it. Lord, what a lot of tears I have seen shed on this little bit of ground! and how soon they were dried up, like a shower in the sunshine. I recollect now there was a young lady sent down here for change of air by the London doctors, after they had poisoned her with their stuff, I dare say. A pretty creature she was as ever I set eyes on, and did not seem ill, only a bit of a cough. Her mother came with her, and then her lover, who was to be married to her when she got well. But at six months' end she died--there she lies, close on your left--and her lover, wasn't he terrible downcast? and he said to me when we had put her comfortably in the ground, 'I shan't be long after her, sexton; keep me that place beside her--there's a guinea for you.' He did not come back, however, for five years, and then I saw him one day go along the road in a chaise and four, with a fine lady by his side, as gay as a lark."