"PLEASE, MR. SOLEMN, WHEN YOU DIE,
WHO'LL HAVE TO DIG YOUR GRAVE?"
[CHAPTER I]
OLD SOLOMON'S VISITOR
IT was a bright morning in spring, and the cemetery on the outskirts of the town looked more peaceful, if possible, than it usually did. The dew was still on the grass, for it was not yet nine o'clock. The violets and snowdrops on little children's graves were peeping above the soil, and speaking of the resurrection. The robins were singing their sweetest songs on the top of mossy gravestones—happy in the stillness of the place. And the sunbeams were busy everywhere, sunning the flowers, lighting up the dewdrops, and making everything glad and pleasant. Some of them even found their way into the deep grave in which Solomon Whitaker, the old grave-digger, was working, and they made it a little less dismal, and not quite so dark.
Not that old Whitaker thought it either dismal or dark. He had been a grave-digger nearly all his life, so he looked upon grave-digging as his vocation, and thought it, on the whole, more pleasant employment than that of most of his neighbours.
It was very quiet in the cemetery at all times, but especially in the early morning; and the old man was not a little startled by hearing a very small voice speaking to him from the top of the grave.
"What are you doing down there, old man?" said the little voice.
The grave-digger looked up quickly, and there, far above him, and peeping cautiously into the grave, was a child in a clean white pinafore, and with a quantity of dark brown hair hanging over her shoulders.
"Whoever in the world are you?" was his first question.