[Pg 39]

The delvers made no pause while the priest read the service, and the clods fell faster than the rain. The box was nicely mortised against another previously deposited, and as there remained an interstice between it and that at its feet, an infant's coffin made the space complete.

The Latin service was of all recitations the most slovenly and contemptuous; the priest might have been either smiling or sleeping; for his very red face appeared to have nothing in common with his scarcely moving lips; and the assistant looked straight at the trench, half covetously, half vindictively, as if he meant to turn the body out of the box directly, and run away with the grave-clothes. It took but two minutes to run through the text; the holy water was dashed from the hyssop; and the priest, with a small shovel, threw a quantity of clods after it. "Requiescat in pace!" he cried, like one just awakened, and now for the first time the grave-diggers ceased; they wanted the customary fee, pour boire.

The exiles never felt so destitute before; not a sou could be found in the Colony. But the little hunchback stepped up with the cross, and gave it to the chief fossoyeur, dropping a franc into his hand; each of the women added some sous, and the younger one quietly tied a small round token of brass to the wood, which she kissed thrice; it bore these words:

"A mon ami."

"A little more than kin and less than kind!" whispered Andy Plade, who knew what such souvenirs meant, in Paris.

The Colony went away disconsolate; but the little[Pg 40] hunchback stopped on the margin, and looked once more into the pit where the box was fast disappearing.

[Pg 40]

"Pardon our debts, bon Dieu!" he said, "as we pardon our debtors."

Shall we who have followed this funeral be kind to the stranger that is within our gates? The quiet old gentleman standing so gravely over the fosse commune might have attracted more regard from the angels than that Iron Duke who once looked down upon the sarcophagus of his enemy in the Hotel des Invalides.

And so Lees was at rest—the master's only son, the heir to lands and houses, and servants, and hopes. He had escaped the bullet, but also that honor which a soldier's death conferred—and thus, abroad and neglected, had existed 

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