Alpheus Briggs, with bowed head, climbed up the winding way among the blackberry bushes, the sumacs and wild roses dainty-sweet; and so at last came to the wall pierced with the whitewashed gate that he himself kept always in repair.
Into the cemetery, his Garden of Gethsemane, he penetrated, by paths flanked with simple and pious stones, many of hard slate carved with death’s-heads, urns, cherubs and weeping-willows, according to the custom of the ancient, godly days. Thus to his family burial lot he came, and there laid his offering upon the graves he loved; and then sat down upon the bench there, for meditation in this hour of sorrow and perplexity.
And as sun and sky and sea, fresh breeze and drifting cloud, and the mild influences of his lifelong friend, tobacco, all worked their soothings on him, he presently plucked up a little heart once more. The nearness of his dead bade him have hope and courage. He felt, in that quiet and solemn place, the tightening of his family bonds; he felt that duty called him to lift even these new and heavy burdens, to bear them valiantly and like a man.
With the graves about him and the sea before, and over all the heavens, calm returned. And sorrow—which, like anger, cannot long be keen—faded into another thought: the thought of how he should make of Hal the man that he would have him be.
How restful was this sunlit hilltop, where he knew that soon he, too, must sleep! The faint, far cries of gulls drifted in to him with the bell-buoy’s slow tolling; and up from the village rose the music of the smitten anvil. That music minded him of a Hindustani poem Hal once had read to him—a poem about the blacksmith, Destiny, beating out showers of sparks upon the cosmic anvil in the night of eternity, each spark a human soul; and each, swiftly extinguished, worth just as much to Destiny as earthly anvil sparks are to the human toiler at the forge—as much and no more.
The poem had thus ended:
“All is Maya, all is illusion! Why struggle, then?
To walk is better than to run; to stand is better than to walk.
To sit is better than to stand; to lie is better than to sit.
To sleep is better than to wake; to dream is better than to live.
Better still is a sleep that is dreamless,
And death is best of all!”
“I wonder if that’s true?” the captain mused. “I wonder if life is all illusion and death alone is real?”
Thus meditating, he felt very near the wife and son who lay there beneath the flowers he had just laid on the close-cut sod. The cloud-shadows, drifting over the hilltop, seemed symbols of the transitory passage of man’s life, unstable, ever drifting on, and leaving on the universe no greater imprint than shadows on the grass. He yearned toward those who had gone to rest before him; and though not a praying man, a supplication voiced itself in him: