“It take time to make them all comfortable, you see, sir,” he returned, taking up his shears again and clipping away at the top and sides of the mound.
“You mean the dead, Coombes?”
“Yes, sir; to be sure, sir.”
“You don’t think it makes much difference to their comfort, do you, whether the grass is one length or another upon their graves?”
“Well no, sir. I don’t suppose it makes much difference to them. But it look more comfortable, you know. And I like things to look comfortable. Don’t you, sir?”
“To be sure I do, Coombes. And you are quite right. The resting-place of the body, although the person it belonged to be far away, should be respected.”
“That’s what I think, though I don’t get no credit for it. I du believe the people hereabouts thinks me only a single hair better than a Jack Ketch. But I’m sure I du my best to make the poor things comfortable.”
He seemed unable to rid his mind of the idea that the comfort of the departed was dependent upon his ministrations.
“The trouble I have with them sometimes! There’s now this same one as lies here, old Jonathan Giles. He have the gout so bad! and just as I come within a couple o’ inches o’ the right depth, out come the edge of a great stone in the near corner at the foot of the bed. Thinks I, he’ll never lie comfortable with that same under his gouty toe. But the trouble I had to get out that stone! I du assure you, sir, it took me nigh half the day.—But this be one of the nicest places to lie in all up and down the coast—a nice gravelly soil, you see, sir; dry, and warm, and comfortable. Them poor things as comes out of the sea must quite enjoy the change, sir.”
There was something grotesque in the man’s persistence in regarding the objects of his interest from this point of view. It was a curious way for the humanity that was in him to find expression; but I did not like to let him go on thus. It was so much opposed to all that I believed and felt about the change from this world to the next!