"Can you see the sun?" said Mr. Dinwiddie.
"No, sir," and "No, Marmaduke."
"Then why do you look at it?"
"I don't know!" laughed Nora; but Daisy said: "Because it is so beautiful, Mr. Dinwiddie."
"Once when I was in Ireland," said the gentleman, "I was looking, near sunset, at some curious old ruins. They were near a very poor little village where I had to pass the night. There had been a little chapel or church of some sort, but it had crumbled away; only bits of the walls were standing, and in place of the floor there was nothing but grass and weeds, and one or two monuments that had been under shelter of the roof. One of them was a large square tomb in the middle of the place. It had been very handsome. The top of it had held two statues, lying there with hands upraised in prayer, in memory of those who slept beneath. But it was so very old he statues had been lying there so long since the roof that sheltered them was gone, that they were worn away so that you could only just see that they had been statues; you could just make out the remains of what had been the heads and where the hands had been. It was all rough and shapeless now."
"What had worn the stone so?" asked Daisy.
"The weather the heat and the cold, and the rain, and the dew."
"But it must have taken a great while?"
"A very great while. Their names were forgotten nobody knew whose monument or what church had been there."
"More than a hundred years?" asked Nora.