A large heavy thing it was, that looked as if it might be hundreds of years old; he turned the lock with it and stepped in, walking down the small brick aisle, observing the ancient oaken seats, the quaint pulpit, and strange brasses; till, white, staring, obtrusive, and all out of taste, he saw in the chancel what he had come to look for, a great white marble monument, on the south side; four fluttering cherubs with short wings that appeared to hold up a marble slab, while two weeping figures knelt below.  First was recorded on the slab the death of Augustus Cuthbert Melcombe, only son of Cuthbert Melcombe, gent., of this place.  Then followed the date of his birth, and there was no date of death, merely the information that he was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy.  Brandon copied this inscription into his note-book.

Below was the name of the young man’s only sister, aged ninety-seven, “universally beloved and respected;” then the solemn words used before death by the aged patriarch, “I have waited for Thy Salvation, O Lord.”  All about the chancel were various small tablets in memory of the successive vicars of the place and their families, but no others with the name of Melcombe on them.  The whole building was so overflowing with the records of human creatures, inside and out, it appeared as if so saturated with man’s thoughts, so used to man’s prayers and tears, so about presently to decline and subside into the earth as he does, that there was almost an effort in believing that it was empty of the beings it seemed to be a part of—­empty of those whom we call the living.

It was easy to move reverently and feel awed in the face of this venerable ancientry.  This was the place, then, where that poor woman had worshipped whose son “had never judged her.”

“If I settled,” he thought, “in a new country, this is the sort of scene that, from time to time, would recur to my thoughts and get hold of me, with almost intolerable power to make life one craving for home.

“How hard to take root in a soil my fathers never ploughed!  Let me abide where my story grew, where my dead are laid, in a country full of days, full of the echoes of old Englishmen’s talk, and whose sunsets are stained as if with the blood shed for their liberties.”

He left the church, noticing, as he went down the aisle, numbers of dogs’-eared books in the different pews, and the narrow window at the east end now letting in long shafts of sunshine; but there was nothing to inform him of any fact that threw light on his step-father’s letter, and he returned the key to the sexton’s wife, and went back to breakfast, telling Mrs. Melcombe where he had been, and remarking that there was no date of death on Augustus Melcombe’s tomb.

“I think they did not know the date,” she replied.  “It was during the long French war that he died, and they were some time uncertain of the fact, but at length the eldest son going to London, wrote his mother an account of how he had met with the captain of his young uncle’s ship, and had been told of his death at sea, somewhere near the West Indies.  The dear grandmother showed me that letter,” observed Mrs. Melcombe, “when first I married.”