to shake the bits of matting which were spread in the church
aisles, and they afterwards rolled them up, he rolling his end, she
rolling hers, until they met, and over the two once divided now
united rolls – sweet emblem! – gave and received a chaste salute.
It was so refreshing to find one of my faded churchyards blooming
into flower thus, that I returned a second time, and a third, and
ultimately this befell:- They had left the church door open, in
their dusting and arranging. Walking in to look at the church, I
became aware, by the dim light, of him in the pulpit, of her in the
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reading-desk, of him looking down, of her looking up, exchanging
tender discourse. Immediately both dived, and became as it were
non-existent on this sphere. With an assumption of innocence I
turned to leave the sacred edifice, when an obese form stood in the
portal, puffily demanding Joseph, or in default of Joseph, Celia.
Taking this monster by the sleeve, and luring him forth on pretence
of showing him whom he sought, I gave time for the emergence of
Joseph and Celia, who presently came towards us in the churchyard,
bending under dusty matting, a picture of thriving and unconscious
industry. It would be superfluous to hint that I have ever since
deemed this the proudest passage in my life.
But such instances, or any tokens of vitality, are rare indeed in
my City churchyards. A few sparrows occasionally try to raise a
lively chirrup in their solitary tree – perhaps, as taking a
different view of worms from that entertained by humanity – but
they are flat and hoarse of voice, like the clerk, the organ, the
bell, the clergyman, and all the rest of the Church-works when they
are wound up for Sunday. Caged larks, thrushes, or blackbirds,
hanging in neighbouring courts, pour forth their strains
passionately, as scenting the tree, trying to break out, and see
leaves again before they die, but their song is Willow, Willow – of
a churchyard cast. So little light lives inside the churches of my
churchyards, when the two are co-existent, that it is often only by
an accident and after long acquaintance that I discover their
having stained glass in some odd window. The westering sun slants
into the churchyard by some unwonted entry, a few prismatic tears
drop on an old tombstone, and a window that I thought was only
dirty, is for the moment all bejewelled. Then the light passes and
the colours die. Though even then, if there be room enough for me
to fall back so far as that I can gaze up to the top of the Church
Tower, I see the rusty vane new burnished, and seeming to look out
with a joyful flash over the sea of smoke at the distant shore of
country.
Blinking old men who are let out of workhouses by the hour, have a
tendency to sit on bits of coping stone in these churchyards,
leaning with both hands on their sticks and asthmatically gasping.
The more depressed class of beggars too, bring hither broken meats,
and munch. I am on nodding terms with a meditative turncock who
lingers in one of them, and whom I suspect of a turn for poetry;
the rather, as he looks out of temper when he gives the fire-plug a
disparaging wrench with that large tuning-fork of his which would
wear out the shoulder of his coat, but for a precautionary piece of
inlaid leather. Fire-ladders, which I am satisfied nobody knows
anything about, and the keys of which were lost in ancient times,
moulder away in the larger churchyards, under eaves like wooden
eyebrows; and so removed are those corners from the haunts of men
and boys, that once on a fifth of November I found a ‘Guy’ trusted
to take care of himself there, while his proprietors had gone to
dinner. Of the expression of his face I cannot report, because it
was turned to the wall; but his shrugged shoulders and his ten
extended fingers, appeared to denote that he had moralised in his