NATURE'S REALM. 83 
‘away in a corner, was a great, gaunt, plain, 
square ‘“ biggin’,” with a high pitched roof and 
narrow peaked windows and confined doors. 
- The walls were of granite, rough dressed ex- 
‘cept at their corners or edges. The roughen- 
ing edge of time had here also smoothed down 
the sharp brand-newness of masons’ delight. 
The gables were high pitched, and at each end 
were the entrances to the sacred house. The 
doors were half folding, of oaken strength, 
skinned and wasped all over their grained sur- 
faces. The steep roof presented no break in 
its monotony except at the end further from 
the Manse, the west end. Here was the only, 
if it could be so called, architectural feature of 
the rigidly plain and simple Gothic pile. This 
was the high stilted belfry. And in that even 
the bell hung half turned over. 
Withal the kirk-yaird had, to sensitive youth, 
-an eerie enough and awesome enough appear- 
ance. The kirk-yaird was like many others, 
little touched by human hands, so long, appa- 
rently, that no too ghastly growth, too rank or 
weedy, made itself over conspicuous or too ob- 
trusive to view from beyond. Away with the 
trimness, the primness, the shorn forlorness of 
straight-edged path and grass plot, as is en- 
tailed on modern ‘‘city cemeteries!” Who 
loves such? Who can lie there comfortably 
after having once delivered himself to Mother 
Earth? Give me the centuries-old resting 
place of the lonely Highland glen; give me its 
mossy-grown walls, its rutted rones, its green 
damp stones that are rude, rough hewn and 
well nigh disappearing out of sight, and unde- 
cipherable. Let no prim, ephemeral artifice 
disturb the wild beauty growth above and 
around our dust. Let pure nature, without 
-any of its rankness or grossness, spread its own 
thick veil over our head. [fit will, let the grass 
move our headstone, and let the moss obliter- 
ate the letters telling our unadorned baptismal 
name. Here where we linger would be a 
pleasant resting place. Here the stones are in 
all half-buried positions or sunk near out of 
sight. The older ones, some of them, have 
strange devices and legends if we could take 
patience to trace them out. Skull and cross 
bones, armorial bearings, all yielding to grad- 
ually obscuring obliteration—crumbling down 
material for plant-growth. How gaunt and 
grotesque they are, as if they had been placed 
there as stolid sentinels till doomsday. Every- 
thing is as still, too, as the death emblems 
around. And it is a high summer's noonday. 
As still as death! Or is it that we have been 
so abstractedly absorbed? Yes! surely; for 
gradually we have seemed to get into some 
nearer communion with that very Nature. 
Nature? Ah! yes. That is always busy, 
even in death. Listen! The air above, and 
even amongst the vegetation at our feet, seems 
waging ever one unweary battle, struggling 
for its own being. The hum of the insect, the 
flit of its wing, all is busy hurry-skurry. The 
sudden moment's glitter of a beaded thread 
evidences the cunning life of many a silent yet 
busy living thing. The high-strung, tremulous 
murmur that rustles among the leaves and 
blades becomes more knowable. Could we 
but see even a little, but a very little, closer 
into the teeming leaves and blades; could we 
see these adding on ceil to cell, and width and 
height to their growing sides and lengthening 
tips! Now, raising the vision just above the 
ground, is seen that warm, glowing, airy wave; 
life’s medium creeping above earth as high as 
the serenity of the pure azure lift. 
All seems so perfect in sympathy, and still 
yet so strange, as if there was a stealing away 
to some realler sphere of more certain peace, 
away from worldly strifes and strivings, all the 
while dimming one’s sense of presentness and 
filling one instead with a full and fuller dread 
feeling of immediate presentiment. Worldly 
strife! Oh! what a double meaning a cunning 
vocabulary can give ! 
This day and this hour ; how long has it not 
been remembered, and so well? Sitting silently 
and so sadly on a hoary headstone of a lineal 
ancestor, long, so long, dust; filled with the 
strangeness of the nearness to the unseen, yet 
never attaining any nearer satisfaction ; seizing, 
as it were, on the untangible; drawn away 
from earth while yearning but the more to it. 
What is it? We feel spirited. That some be- 
ing, that we will never have the power to realize, 
call it what we will, is around us; that it has 
stepped forth and filled the void. It seems as 
if our own inward being goes forth and would 
