BRIGHTER DAYS FOR TIM. 75 



bequest, with the small remainder of his monumental legacy, 

 was kept up by occasional work at his old employ, and, sub- 

 sequently, by the profits of a little day-school, which, with 

 some unrequited labour, brought him also pleasures he had 

 never known. From an object of the children's dislike and 

 fear, he came, as they knew him better, to be one of their 

 respect and love ; and this opened his heart to feelings more 

 connected with the sympathies of life, more youthful, too, 

 than ever had been his in his own childish, but most unchild- 

 like days when his first ideas, his earliest instruction, even 

 his scanty recreations, were all connected with inmates of the 

 " narrow house," and derived from one of its keepers. Instead 

 of his spectral visits to the churchyard, when only the owls 

 and bats and beetles were on wing, under the cold blighting 

 moonbeams, he loved, when his daily employ was ended, or 

 before it was begun, to seek the woods and meadows, to drink 

 draughts of life in the morning air, and take warm baths in 

 the summer sunset. 



But let it not be thought that when " Tombstone Tim " be- 

 came thus numbered with the living, he ever forgot his reve- 

 rence of, or duties to, the dead. Amidst the general neglect 

 which pervaded our churchyard, Tim's labours of love were 

 always conspicuously visible upon the three humble sods 

 where rested his parents and grandfather, the old m sexton, 

 whose example and last injunction he failed not to follow by 

 the most scrupulous attention to the Tomkins' Tomb. 



