Two of the men were talking at the gate, one of them carrying a spade in hands still crusted with the soil of graves.  Their very aspect was delightful to me; and I crept nearer to them, thinking to pick up some snatch of sexton gossip, some ’talk fit for a charnel,’ {9b} something, in fine, worthy of that fastidious logician, that adept in coroner’s law, who has come down to us as the patron of Yaughan’s liquor, and the very prince of gravediggers.  Scots people in general are so much wrapped up in their profession that I had a good chance of overhearing such conversation:  the talk of fish-mongers running usually on stockfish and haddocks; while of the Scots sexton I could repeat stories and speeches that positively smell of the graveyard.  But on this occasion I was doomed to disappointment.  My two friends were far into the region of generalities.  Their profession was forgotten in their electorship.  Politics had engulfed the narrower economy of grave-digging.  ‘Na, na,’ said the one, ‘ye’re a’ wrang.’  ‘The English and Irish Churches,’ answered the other, in a tone as if he had made the remark before, and it had been called in question—­’The English and Irish Churches have impoverished the country.’

‘Such are the results of education,’ thought I as I passed beside them and came fairly among the tombs.  Here, at least, there were no commonplace politics, no diluted this-morning’s leader, to distract or offend me.  The old shabby church showed, as usual, its quaint extent of roofage and the relievo skeleton on one gable, still blackened with the fire of thirty years ago.  A chill dank mist lay over all.  The Old Greyfriars’ churchyard was in perfection that morning, and one could go round and reckon up the associations with no fear of vulgar interruption.  On this stone the Covenant was signed.  In that vault, as the story goes, John Knox took hiding in some Reformation broil.  From that window Burke the murderer looked out many a time across the tombs, and perhaps o’ nights let himself down over the sill to rob some new-made grave.  Certainly he would have a selection here.  The very walks have been carried over forgotten resting-places; and the whole ground is uneven, because (as I was once quaintly told) ’when the wood rots it stands to reason the soil should fall in,’ which, from the law of gravitation, is certainly beyond denial.  But it is round the boundary that there are the finest tombs.  The whole irregular space is, as it were, fringed with quaint old monuments, rich in death’s-heads and scythes and hour-glasses, and doubly rich in pious epitaphs and Latin mottoes—­rich in them to such an extent that their proper space has run over, and they have crawled end-long up the shafts of columns and ensconced themselves in all sorts of odd corners among the sculpture.  These tombs raise their backs against the rabble of squalid dwelling-houses, and every here and there a clothes-pole projects between