CHAPTER 1

OLD SOLOMON'S VISITOR

It was a bright morning in spring, and the cemetery on the outskirts of the town looked more peaceful, if possible, than it usually did. The dew was still on the grass, for it was not yet nine o'clock. The violets and snowdrops on little children's graves were peeping above the soil, and speaking of the resurrection. The robins were singing their sweetest songs on the top of mossy gravestones––happy in the stillness of the place. And the sunbeams were busy everywhere, sunning the flowers, lighting up the dewdrops, and making everything glad and pleasant. Some of them even found their way into the deep grave in which Solomon Whitaker, the old grave-digger, was working, and they made it a little less dismal, and not quite so dark.

Not that old Whitaker thought it either dismal or dark. He had been a grave-digger nearly all his life, so he looked upon grave-digging as his vocation, and thought it, on the whole, more pleasant employment than that of most of his neighbours.

It was very quiet in the cemetery at all times, but especially in the early morning; and the old man was not a little startled by hearing a very small voice speaking to him from the top of the grave.

“What are you doing down there, old man?” said the little voice.

The grave-digger looked up quickly, and there, far above him, and peeping cautiously into the grave, was a child in a clean white pinafore, and with a quantity of dark brown hair hanging over her shoulders.

“Whoever in the world are you?” was his first question.

His voice sounded very awful, coming as it did out of the deep grave, and the child ran away, and disappeared as suddenly as she had come.

Solomon looked up several times afterwards as he threw up fresh spadefuls of earth, but for some time he saw no more of his little visitor. But she was not far away; she was hiding behind a high tombstone, and in a few minutes she took courage, and went again to the top of the grave. This time she did not speak, but stood with her finger in her mouth, looking shyly down upon him, as her long brown hair blew wildly about in the breeze.

Solomon thought he had never seen such a pretty little thing. He had had a little girl once, and though she had been dead more than thirty years, he had not quite forgotten her.

“What do they call you, my little dear?” said he, as gently as his husky old voice would let him say it.

“Dot,” said the child, nodding her head at him from the top of the grave.

“That's a very funny name,” said Solomon; “I can't think on that I ever heard it afore.”

“Dot isn't my real name; they call me Ruth in my father's big Bible on our parlour table.”

“That's got nothing to do with Dot as I can see,” said the grave-digger, musingly.

“No,” she said, shaking her long brown hair out of her eyes; “it's 'cause I'm such a little dot of a thing that they call me Dot.”

“Oh, that's it, is it?” said Solomon; and then he went into a deep meditation on names, and called to mind some strange ones which he had read on the old churchyard gravestones.

When Solomon was in one of his “reverdies,” as his old wife used to call them when she was alive, he seldom took much notice of what was going on around him, and he had almost forgotten the little girl, when she said suddenly, in a half-frightened voice––

“I wonder what they call you, old man?”

“Solomon,” said the grave-digger; “Mr. Solomon Whitaker––that's my name.”

“Then, please, Mr. Solemn, what are you doing down there?”

“I'm digging a grave,” said Solomon.

“What's it for, please, Mr. Solemn?” asked the child.

“Why, to bury folks in, of course,” said the old man.

Little Dot retreated several steps when she heard this, as if she were afraid Mr. Solomon might want to bury her. When he looked up again there was only a corner of her white pinafore in sight. But as he went on quietly with his work, and took no notice of her, Dot thought she might venture near again, for she wanted to ask Mr. Solomon another question.

“Please,” she began, “who are you going to put in that there hole?”

“It's a man as fell down dead last week. He was a hard-working fellow, that he was,” said the grave-digger; for he always liked to give people a good word when digging their graves.

Dot now seemed satisfied; and on her side, told the old man that she had come to live in one of the small cottages near the cemetery gates, and that they used to be “ever so far off” in the country.

Then she ran away to another part of the cemetery, and old Solomon shaded his eyes with his hand to watch her out of sight.

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