“An’ ye woant see ’e rest?” quavered the old sexton at our next movement. “’E be foine brawsses! Quawlity all of um—’e be!”
Seeing our obduracy, he hobbled to the side-door and unlocked it, amid many groans from himself and the rusty wards. The July light and air were welcome after the damp twilight within. In death at least, it would seem to be better with the poor than the “quality,” if sun and breeze are boons. The churchyard is small and ridged closely with graves. The old man led the way between and over these to the last home of the Dairyman’s Daughter. We gathered about it, looked reverently upon the low swell of turf. There is a metrical epitaph, sixteen lines in length, presumably the composition of the lady at whose expense the stone was raised. It begins:
“Stranger! if e’er by chance or feeling led,
Upon this hallowed turf thy footsteps tread,
Turn from the contemplation of the sod,
And think on her whose spirit rests with God.”
The rest is after the same order, a mechanical jingle in pious measure. It offends one who has not been educated to appreciate the value of post-mortem patronage bestowed by the lofty upon the lowly. It was enough for us to know that the worn body of Legh Richmond’s “Elizabeth” lay there peacefully sleeping away the ages.
We had picked up in a Ventnor bookshop a shabby little copy of Richmond’s “Annals of the Poor,” printed in 1828. It contained a sketch of Mr. Richmond’s life by his son-in-law, The Dairyman’s Daughter, The Negro Servant, and The Young Cottager, the scene of all these narratives being in the Isle of Wight. We reread them with the pensive pleasure one feels in unbinding a pacquet of letters, spotted and yellowed by time, but which hands beloved once pressed, and yielding still the faint fragrance of the rose-leaves we laid away with them when the pages were white and fresh. We, who drew delight with instruction from Sunday-School libraries more than thirty years back, knew Elizabeth, the “Betsey” of father and mother, better than we did our next-door neighbors. Prima and Secunda, allured by my enthusiasm to read the book, declared that her letters to her spiritual adviser “were prosy and priggish,” but that the hold of the story upon my heart was not all the effect of early association was abundantly proved by their respectful mention of her humble piety and triumphant death.
By her side lies the sister at whose funeral Legh Richmond first met his modest heroine. In the same family group sleep the Dairyman and his wife. “The mother died not long after the daughter,” says Mr. Richmond, “and I have good reason to believe that God was merciful to her and took her to Himself. The good old Dairyman died in 1816, aged 84. His end was eminently Christian.”
Elizabeth died May 30, 1801, at the age of thirty-one.