The clergyman's horse, stumbling with a dull blunt
sound among the graves, was cropping the grass; at once.
deriving orthodox consolation from the dead parishioners,
and enforcing last Sunday's text that this was what all
flesh came to; a lean ass who had sought to expound it also,
without being qualified and ordained, was pricking his ears
in an empty pound hard by, and looking with hungry eyes
upon his priestly neighbour.

The old man and the child quitted the gravel path, and
strayed among the tombs; for there the ground was soft,
and easy to their tired feet. As they passed behind the
church, they heard voices near at hand, and presently came
on those who had spoken.

They were two men who were seated in easy attitudes
upon the grass, and so busily engaged as to be at first
unconscious of intruders. It was not difficult to divine
that they were of a class of itinerant showmen--exhibitors
of the freaks of Punch--for, perched cross-legged upon a
tombstone behind them, was a figure of that hero himself,
his nose and chin as hooked and his face as beaming as
usual. Perhaps his imperturbable character was never
more strikingly developed, for he preserved his usual
equable smile notwithstanding that his body was dangling
in a most uncomfortable position, all loose and limp and
shapeless, while his long peaked cap, unequally balanced
against his exceedingly slight legs, threatened every instant
to bring him toppling down.

In part scattered upon the ground at the feet of the two
men, and in part jumbled together in a long flat box, were
the other persons of the Drama. The hero's wife and one
child, the hobby-horse, the doctor, the foreign gentleman
who not being familiar with the language is unable in the
representation to express his ideas otherwise than by the
utterance of the word "Shallabalah" three distinct times,
the Radical neighbour who will by no means admit that
a tin bell is an organ, the executioner, and the Devil, were
all here. Their owners had evidently come to that spot to
make some needful repairs in the stage arrangements, for
one of them was engaged in binding together a small
gallows with thread, while the other was intent upon fixing
a new black wig, with the aid of a small hammer and some
tacks, upon the head of the Radical neighbour, who had
been beaten bald.

They raised their eyes when the old man and his young

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