Gravelines

“ Griselda had thrown herself into a chair, and laid aside her cloak and hood. All her beautiful hair fell over her shoulders like rippling waves of gold.
"Dear Graves, I have met a gentleman often, who is not like the rest of the world's votaries. His name is Travers; his mother frequents the chapel in the Vineyards. Take me thither with you next Sunday! Say you will, Graves!" ”

“ On the eastern side there was neither fence nor dyke. The graveyard there straggled off into a young fir plantation, ever pushing nearer to the graves and deepening eastward into a thick wood. The air was always full of the harp-like voices of the sea, and the music of gray old trees, and in the spring mornings the choruses of birds in the elms around the two churches sang of life and not of death. The Meredith children loved the old graveyard. ”

“ The people of the richer classes, when they possessed a bit of land, often directed that they should be interred [68] therein; so it happened that there was no large assemblage of graves at any one place. In one of Demosthenes’s orations, the stone-cutter comes to the house that he may complete the tomb in the neighboring field [249] . More frequently the graves were constructed by the side of some much traveled road where the passer-by might observe the monument. From an inscription on a child’s tomb, we learn that “her parents sorrowfully buried her at the junction of three roads [250] .” ”

“ Graves's voice and manner were so unusual that Griselda started up.
"What is the matter?" she asked. "Why do you look so miserable? Was she trying your patience—you poor dear old Graves—past bearing? Graves, why don't you speak?" But Graves's mouth was close shut, and she looked as if determined not to answer. "Look, Graves, I have written a letter to Mr. Travers, and told him what Lady Betty said to me; that is, I told him she said she would cast me off, unless I did as she chose in a matter which I could not explain in a letter, but connected with Sir Maxwell Danby." ”

“ There is a cluster of wooden crosses in the fields over against the asylum, where I have seen orderlies digging fresh graves when I have passed that way. There are graves on the ramparts, old graves hastily dug in the leaf-mould by the shallow trenches thrown up by the French round the city in October, and new graves, the resting-place of men killed in and about the city when the trees were green with this year’s summer foliage. ”

“ Grotesque graves dot the hills or stand up against the sky-line: pyramidal graves, tumulus graves, rock graves—everywhere, graves. And, occasionally, as the boat rounds a rocky point, one sees a deserted city up above—houses, walls, battlements, with the sun shining through the empty window squares. ”

“ His sister watched him go without irritation or surprise. Rising from her chair, she stood by the fire warming her feet, and glancing from time to time at the dim rows of family portraits that adorned the library walls. There were many of them, dating back to the early part of the seventeenth century or even before it; for the Graveses, or the De Greves as they used to be called, were an ancient race, and though the house had been rebuilt within the last hundred and twenty years, they had occupied this same spot of ground for many generations. ”

“ At a recent meeting of the Norwich Archæological Society, the members [Pg 363] made an excursion to Brandon and neighbourhood, and at Grime's Graves Mr. Manning read a paper on the Graves, in which he maintained that this irregularly-shaped cluster of holes are ancient British dwellings, forming the remains of an ancient town. Each hole was lined with a layer of stones, and, when inhabited, roofed over with boughs or grass. The term "graves" means pits or holes, and the name "Grime's" was probably derived from "Græme," the Saxon for witch, or rather for anything supernatural. ”

“ Nothing more: save that near these ugly mounds, unpolitical, untaught, ill-dressed man and woman will sometimes linger, sparing an hour from the common toil of practical place to foolishly weep, thinking on the friends that are gone. The hideously excellent cemetery of Grumbler's Gully always seemed to me to realise the life of the colony--the stern, practical, laborious, unleisured life of a young country, a life in which one has no time to think of others until they have left us and gone Home. ”

“ When Graves tried to put her down she would cling to him, and it took real force to pry her loose.
In the open she could run like a rat; and in open country it would have been impossible to desert her; she would have followed at Graves's heels as fast as [Pg 354] he could move them. But forcing through the thick grass tired her after a few hundred yards, and she would gradually drop farther and farther behind—sobbing. ”

“ We visited the burying-ground, a plot of land not very small, crowded with graves, and upright grave-stones, over-looking the village and the dell. It was now the closing in of evening. Women and children were gathering in the linen for the night, which was bleaching [Pg 180] by the burn-side;—the graves overgrown with grass, such as, by industrious culture, had been raised up about the houses; but there were bunches of heather here and there, and with the blue-bells that grew among the grass the small plot of ground had a beautiful and wild appearance. ”

“ Turning down a lane on your left, a few rods beyond Liberty Bridge, you reach a spot known as the Point of Graves, chiefly interesting as showing what a graveyard may come to if it last long enough. In 1671 one Captain John Pickering, of whom we shall have more to say, ceded to the town a piece of ground on this neck for burial purposes. It is an odd-shaped lot, comprising about half an acre, inclosed by a crumbling red brick wall two or three feet high, with wood capping. The place is overgrown with thistles, rank grass, and fungi; the black slate headstones have mostly fallen over ”

“ Sometimes, looking at the view and seeing those mounds against the sky, I get the same uncanny feeling that comes over me at places in Egypt and Etruria—the whole living country is dominated by the dead. There are six of these graves within about two miles on the range of hills behind Grimspound; and when one of them was opened in 1872, the chieftain’s dagger was found—a blade of bronze and a pommel of amber with a pattern worked in gold.
On a grave in Moreton churchyard there is a little granite figure of a child with wings. A man from Cornwall was working in a quarry near there ”

“ There are not enough people even to wear a footpath. And folk live and die in these lonely spots, and a grave, quite fresh made, with a gaudily painted gravestone, stood close by. One or two men, black-eyed, barefooted, and in clothes that were torn to ribbons, sauntered up. None of them made an attempt to speak to me, and they scarcely exchanged a word with my guide. ”

“ A word about this Grumbler's Gully Cemetery. It is close to the hospital, a fine building containing fifty beds, and supported by voluntary contributions: and the patients can see the grave of a man who died yesterday quite readily. Grumbler's Gully can see no reason why they should not see it. Sick people must die sometimes, of course. In the same spirit has the cemetery been built. It is a square patch of ground surrounded by a neat iron railing. Everything spick and span new, the railing not even rusted, to the sordid red mounds not even overgrown with grass. ”

“ At any rate the passage clearly shows that the orientation of graves was assumed by the poet to have been observed, even in the solitudes.
A scrap of quaint, but illuminating, evidence comes from the folk-lore of Wales, where the East wind is called “the wind of the dead men’s feet [611] .” Nor is the practice of orienting graves confined to Britain. A Scandinavian folk-story makes the grave-diggers, either through stress of bad weather, or “out of mischief,” bury an unpopular person, one Jón Flak, in a grave{247} dug North and South. ”

“ God gave me these three graves instead of the grave of my boy. I could not tend them so well if they were in the churchyard. It is too far from my house. Nay, nay, let the three sleep here.”
“But you have not the room, madame.”
“There is room in my heart and in my garden, mynheer. I shall keep these three graves, and maybe in Germany there is some one who will keep the grave of my boy.”
“Messieurs, there is no use arguing with a Belgian peasant,” said the Commissaire of Metseys, as we walked back through the Street of the Spy to our waiting automobile. ”

“ He carefully drew the curtains in the rear, on both sides and in front, for, notwithstanding his cavalier manner in the presence of royalty, Graves was more than passing fond of his employer and desired to spare the latter the humiliation of being seen with a lady of uncertain lineage and doubtful social standing riding in public with him in his limousine. ”

“ The graves in this silent city, perhaps numbering some three, four, or even five millions, belong to all ages, to every rank and order. There are crypts containing the remains of members of the Imperial family, of men and women of senatorial and of the most exalted rank among the proud patrician houses. There are graves of merchants and traders, of the very rich, of the very poor; there are innumerable graves of freedmen, of the vast class too of the sad-eyed slave. ”

“ On our frequent visits to Georgetown we had often noticed, in a secluded spot a little way from the road, two graves side by side, with rude head-boards containing the names and residence of the deceased. I was more affected by this simple emblem of mortality than by the costliest monuments of populous graveyards. There death has become, as it were, common; it is the rule, and not the exception—it ceases to be a distinction, and no longer affects the imagination. ”

“ Plan II is located 4 miles southwest of the city of La Salle, on Cedar Creek, a small stream flowing into the Illinois River from the south. There were three graves two and a half feet deep, on a gravel point projecting out from the ridge. No mounds had been erected over them. They were close together. They were discovered by some laborers while digging for gravel. One of them, possessing a little curiosity, gathered up the bones and relics. One body was deposited in each grave, and in a recumbent position. ”

“ Each Family has a particular [250] Part, walled in like a garden, where the Bones of their Ancestors have remained undisturbed for many generations. The Graves are all distinct and separate, and the space between as planted with Beautiful Flowers, bordered round with Stone, or paved over with Tiles. The Graves of the Great People are likewise distinguished by Square Rooms with Cupolas built over them, which, being kept constantly clean, whitewashed, and beautified, nevertheless continue like the hypocrites, and are but Sepulchres full within of nothing but Dead Men's Bones. ”

“ So we started for Graves's house, Don very close at my heels.
"Graves," I said, "surely a taboo by a lot of fool islanders hasn't upset you. There's something on your mind. Bad news?"
"Oh, no," he said. "She's coming. It's other things. I'll tell you by and by—everything. Don't mind me. I'm all right. Listen to the wind in the grass. That sound day and night is enough to put a man off his feed."
"You say you found something very curious back there in the grass?"
"I found, among other things, a stone monolith. It's fallen down, but it's almost as big as the Flatiron Building in New York. ”

“ The scene at Gravelly Run meeting-house at 8 and at 10 o'clock on Saturday night, is one of the solemn contrasts of the war, and, I hope, the last of them. A little frame church, planted among the pines, and painted white, with cool, green window-shutters, holds at its foot a gallery for the negroes, and at the head a varnished pulpit. I found its [Pg 329] pews moved to the green plain over the threshold, and on its bare floors the screaming wounded. Blood ran in little rills across the planks, and, human feet treading in them, had made indelible prints in every direction ”

“ He slumbers, but he has not died. The ancient Welsh poem called “The Verses of the Graves of the Warriors” [435] enumerates the last resting-places of most of the British gods and demi-gods. “The grave of Gwydion is in the marsh of Dinlleu”, the grave of Lieu Llaw Gyffes is “under the protection of the sea with which he was familiar”, and “where the wave makes a sullen sound is the grave of Dylan”; we know the graves of Pryderi, of Gwalchmei, of March, of Mabon, even of the great Beli, but
“Not wise the thought—a grave for Arthur”. ”

“ Almost exactly opposite my windows is an old graveyard, the stones in which are for the most part mossed and gray. A gravel path winds in and out of the sleeping-places of men long dead, and round it stand a half-dozen of fine elms. It borders on the road, and is separated from it by only a low paling. ”

“ The old woman suggests that we visit the little village graveyard, at the corner of the field. The Zouave officers are buried there—those who were recognized as officers. Some English had also been found and carried there. She is the caretaker [Pg 63] of the little graveyard. She will show it to us. She says that it is much more interesting than the field. The field is much too muddy.
The world is as still as the death all around us when we enter that little country graveyard. It has been trampled by a multitude. ”