“The headstone, with the foot on it, was just here,” said Ned, in much perplexity, “and, as far as I can judge, the old sunken grave exactly marked out the space of this new one.” [Endnote: 1.]
“It is a shame,” said Elsie, much shocked at the indecorum, “that the new person should be thrust in here; for the old one was a friend of ours.”
“But what has become of the headstone!” exclaimed the young English stranger.
During their perplexity, a person had approached the group, wading through the snow from the gateway giving entrance from the street; a gaunt figure, with stooping shoulders, over one of which was a spade and some other tool fit for delving in the earth; and in his face there was the sort of keen, humorous twinkle that grave-diggers somehow seem to get, as if the dolorous character of their business necessitated something unlike itself by an inevitable reaction.
“Well, Doctor,” said he, with a shrewd wink in his face, “are you looking for one of your patients? The man who is to be put to bed here was never caught in your spider’s web.”
“No,” said Doctor Grimshawe; “when my patients have done with me, I leave them to you and the old Nick, and never trouble myself about them more. What I want to know is, why you have taken upon you to steal a man’s grave, after he has had immemorial possession of it. By what right have you dug up this bed, undoing the work of a predecessor of yours, who has long since slept in one of his own furrows?”
“Why, Doctor,” said the grave-digger, looking quietly into the cavernous pit which he had hollowed, “it is against common sense that a dead man should think to keep a grave to himself longer than till you can take up his substance in a shovel. It would be a strange thing enough, if, when living families are turned out of their homes twice or thrice in a generation, (as they are likely to be in our new government,) a dead man should think he must sleep in one spot till the day of judgment. No; turn about, I say, to these old fellows. As long as they can decently be called dead men, I let them lie; when they are nothing but dust, I just take leave to stir them on occasion. This is the way we do things under the republic, whatever your customs be in the old country.”
“Matters are very much the same in any old English churchyard,” said the English stranger. “But, my good friend, I have come three thousand miles, partly to find this grave, and am a little disappointed to find my labor lost.”
“Ah! and you are the man my father was looking for,” said the grave-digger, nodding his head at Mr. Hammond. “My father, who was a grave-digger afore me, died four and thirty years ago, when we were under the King; and says he, ‘Ebenezer, do not you turn up a sod in this spot, till you have turned up every other in the ground.’ And I have always obeyed him.”
“And what was the reason of such a singular prohibition?” asked Hammond.