How vain it is to send a poor forsaken
name, like the title page of a lost book, down the careless stream
of time! Let me serve my generation, and let God remember me!"
The morning wore on; the sun rose higher and higher. He drew from
his pocket the Nosce Teipsum. of Sir John Davies, and was still
reading, in quiet enjoyment of the fine logic of the lawyer poet,
when he heard the church key, in the trembling hand of Jonathan Auld,
the sexton, jar feebly battling with the reluctant lock. Soon the
people began to gather, mostly in groups and couples. At length
came solitary Miss Horn, whom the neighbours, from respect to her
sorrow, had left to walk alone. But Mr Graham went to meet her,
and accompanied her into the church.
It was a cruciform building, as old as the vanished monastery, and
the burial place of generations of noble blood; the dust of royalty
even lay under its floor. A knight of stone reclined cross legged
in a niche with an arched Norman canopy in one of the walls, the
rest of which was nearly encased in large tablets of white marble,
for at his foot lay the ashes of barons and earls whose title was
extinct, and whose lands had been inherited by the family of Lossie.
Inside as well as outside of the church the ground had risen with
the dust of generations, so that the walls were low; and heavy
galleries having been erected in parts, the place was filled with
shadowy recesses and haunted with glooms. From a window in the
square pew where he sat, so small and low that he had to bend his
head to look out of it, the schoolmaster could see a rivulet of
sunshine, streaming through between two upright gravestones, and
glorifying the long grass of a neglected mound that lay close to
the wall under the wintry drip from the eaves: when he raised his
head, the church looked very dark.
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