At that moment some one came heavily down the stairs and knocked at the parlor-door.

"Come in," cried Pettigrove. A man with red face and white hair shuffled into the room. He was dressed in a black suit that had been made for a man not only bigger, but probably different in other ways.

"We shall have to shift her down here now," he began. "I was sure we should. The coffin 's too big to get round that awkward crook in these stairs when it 's loaded. In fact, 't is impossible. Better have her down now afore we put her in, or there 'll be an accident on the day, as sure as judgment." The man, then noticing Cronshaw, said: "Good morning, sir. You'll excuse me."

The ironmonger stared at him with horror, and then put his note-book away.

and after conferring with Pettigrove for some time, the stranger went off to see the vicar, saying as he shook hands:

"I shall of course see you again when it is all over. How bewildering it is, and what a shock it is! From one day to another, and then nothing! And the day after to-morrow they'll be buried beside one another. I am very sorry, most sorry. I shall of course come and see you again when it is all over."

After he had gone, Pettigrove walked about the room murmuring:

"She was a lady, a handsome lady," and then, still murmuring, he stumbled up the stairs to the undertakers. His wife lay on the bed in a white gown. He enveloped her stiff, thin body in a blanket and carried it downstairs to the parlor; the others, with much difficulty, carried down the coffin, and when they had fixed it upon some trestles, they unwrapped Carrie from the blankets and laid her in it. Caroline and Carrie were buried on

"You'll pardon me, Mr. Pettigrove. I had no idea that you had had a bereavement, too."

"two nights ago."

"Two nights ago! I am very sorry, most sorry," stammered the other, picking up his umbrella and hat. "I'll go away. What a sad coincidence!"

"There's no call to do that; what's got to be done, must be done."

"I'll not detain you long then; just a few details. I am most sorry, very sorry; it's extraordinary."

sign of the Tull carpenter bore the following notice:

COMPLETE UNDERTAKER

SMALL HEARSE KEPT

fields, breathing into any friendly bush. Rooks pecked industriously at the tough pastures, but wiser fowls, unlike the fabulous good child, could be neither seen nor heard. And all day some one was grinding corn at the mill-house; the engine was old, and kept on emitting explosions that shook the neighborhood like a dreadful bomb. Pettigrove, who had not provided himself with a black overcoat, and therefore wore none at all, shivered so intensely during the ceremony that the keen edge of his grief was dulled, and indeed from that time onward his grief, whatever its source, seemed deprived of all keenness; it just dulled him with a permanent dullness.

He caused to be placed on his wife's grave a headstone, quite small, not a yard high, inscribed to

CAROLINE

THE BELOVED WIFE OF

JOHN PETTIGROVE

Some days after its erection he was astonished to find the headstone had fallen flat on its face. It was very strange, but, after all, it was a small matter, a simple affair; so in the dusk he himself took a spade and set it up again. A day or two later it had fallen once more. He was now inclined to some suspicion; he fancied that mischievous boys had done it. He would complain to the vicar. But Pettigrove was an easy-going man; he did not complain. He replaced the stone, setting it more deeply in the earth and padding the turf more firmly about it.

When it fell the third time he was astonished and deeply moved, but he was no longer in doubt, and as he once more made a good upheaval by the grave in the dusk he said in his mind,

and he felt, too, in his heart, that he understood.

"It will not fall again," he said, and he was right. It did not.

Pettigrove himself lived for another score of years, during which the monotony of his life was but mildly varied; he just went on registering births and deaths and rearing little oaks and pines, firs and sycamores. Sentimental deference to the oft-repeated wish of his wife led him to join the church choir and sing its anthems and hymns with a secular blitheness that was at least mellifluous. Moreover, after a year or two, he did become a parish councilor, and in a modest way was something of a "shining light."

"If I were you," observed an old countryman to him, "and I had my way, I know what I would do: I would live in a little house and have a quiet life, and I would n't care the toss of a ha'penny for nothing and nobody!"

In the time of May, always, Pettigrove would wander in Tull Great Wood as far as the hidden pleasaunce where the hawthorn so whitely bloomed. None but he knew of that, or remembered it, and when its dying petals were heaped upon the grass he gathered handfuls to keep in his pocket till they rotted. Sometimes he thought he would leave Tull and see something of the world; he often thought of that, but it seemed as if time had stabilized and contracted round his heart, and he did not go. At last, after twenty years of widowerhood, he died and was buried, and this was the manner of that.

Two men were digging his grave on the morning of the interment, summer's day so everlasting beautiful

a

that it was incredible any one should be dead. The two men, an ancient named Jethro and a younger whom he called Mark, went to sit in the cool porch for a brief rest. The work on the grave had been much delayed, but now the old headstone was laid on one side and most of the earth that had covered his wife's body was heaped in untidy mounds upon the turf close by. Otherwise there was no change in the yard or the trees that grew so high, the grass that grew so green, the dark brick wall, or the door of fugitive blue; there was even a dappled goat quietly cropping. A woman came into the porch, remarked upon the grand day, and then passed into the church to her task of tidying up for the ceremony. Jethro took a swig of drink from a bottle and handed it to his mate.

"You don't remember old Fan as used to clean the church, do you? No, 't was 'fore you come about these parts. She was a smartish old gal. Bother me if one of them goats did n't follow her into the darn church on a day, ah, and would n't be drove out on it, neither, no, and she chasing of it from here to there, and one place and another, but out it would not go, that goat. And at last it act-u-ally marched up into the pulpit and put its two fore legs on the holy book and said, Baa-a-a!" Here Jethro gave a prolonged imitation of a goat's cry. "Well, old Fan had been a bit skeered, but she was so overcome by that bit of piety that, darn me, if she did n't sit down and play the organ for it!"

Mark received this narration with a lack-luster air, and at once the two men resumed their work. Meanwhile a man ascended the church tower; other men had gone into the home of

the dead man. through the blue door in the wall, and the bell gave forth its first solemn toll.

Soon the vicar came

"Hey, Jethro," called Mark from the grave. "What d' you say 's the name of this chap?"

"Pettigrove. Hurry up, now." Mark, after bending down, whispered from the grave:

"What was his wife's name?"

"Why, man alive, that 'u'd be Pettigrove, too."

The bell in the tower gave another profoundly solemn beat.

"What's the name on that headstone?" asked Mark.

"Caroline Pettigrove. What be you thinking on?"

"We 're in the wrong hole, Jethro; come and see for yourself. The plate on this old coffin says Caroline Cronshaw; see for yourself. We're in the wrong hole."

Again the bell voiced its admonition. Jethro descended the short ladder and stood in the grave with Mark just as the cortège entered the church by the door on the opposite side of the yard. He knelt down and rubbed with his own fingers the dulled inscription on the moldering coffin. There was no doubt about it; Caroline Cronshaw lay there.

"Well, may I go to glory!" slowly said the old man. It may have occurred to Mark that this was an extravagantly remote destination to prescribe; at any rate, he said:

"There ain't no time now. Come." "Who the devil be she? However come that wrong headstone to be put on this wrong grave?" quavered the kneeling man.

"Are you coming out?" growled Mark, standing with one foot on the ladder, "or ain't you? They'll be

chucking him on top of you in a minute. There's no time, I tell you."

""T is a strange come-up as ever I see," said the old man, striking one wall of the grave with his hand. "That 's where we should be, Mark, next door; but there's no time to change it, and it must go as it is, Mark. Well, it 's fate; what is to be must be, whether it 's good or right, and you can't odds it. You darn't go against it, or you be wrong." They stood in the grave muttering together. "Not a word, Mark, mind you!" At last they shoveled some earth back upon the telltale name-plate, climbed out of the grave, drew up the ladder, and stood with bent heads as the coffin was borne from the church toward them. It was lowered into the grave, and at the "earth to earth" Jethro, with a flirt of his spade, dropped in a handful of sticky marl, another at "ashes to ashes," and again at the "dust to dust." Finally, when they were alone together again, they covered in the old lovers, dumping the earth tightly and everlastingly about them, and reset the headstone, Jethro remarking as they did so:

"That headstone, well, 't is a mystery, Mark! And I can't bottom it. I can't bottom it at all."

And indeed, how should it not be, for the secret had long since been forgotten by its originator.