The Guardian of God's Acre - Page 2

retorted with some spirit, for the implied slur upon Our Square stung me. "In fact, I was reading one of our local publications when you inter--when you arrived. It contains some very interesting poetry."

"Yeh?" said the hard, pink man politely.

"For example, in this issue I find the following apostrophe." I proceeded to read aloud:

"Farewell, our dear one, we must part, For thou hast gone to heavenly home, While we below with aching heart Must long for thee and ever moan."

"Swell stuff," commented the sharer of my bench, with determined interest. "Poetry's a little out of my line, but I'm for it. Who wrote that?"

"It is signed 'Loving Father and 3 Sisters.' But the actual authorship rests with the long gentleman in black whom you see leaning on the park fence yonder. His name is Bartholomew Storrs and he is the elegiac or mortuary or memorial laureate of Our Square."

This was said with intent to mortify the soul of my new acquaintance in revenge for his previous display of erudition. The bewilderment in his face told me that I had scored heavily. But he quickly rallied.

"Do I get you right?" he queried. "Does he write those hymns for other folks to sign?"

"He does."

"What does he do that for?"

"Money. He gets as high as five dollars per stanza."

"Some salesman!" My hard-faced companion regarded the lank figure overhanging the fence with new respect. "Looks to me like the original Gloom," he observed. "What's his grouch?"

"Conscience."

"He must have a bum one!"

"He has a busy one. He expends a great amount of time and sorrow repenting of our sins."

"Whose sins?" asked the other, opening wider his dull and weary eyes.

"Ours. His neighbors. Everybody in Our Square."

My interlocutor promptly and fitly put into words the feeling which had long lurked within my consciousness, ashamed to express itself against a monument of dismal pity such as Bartholomew Storrs. "He's got a nerve!" he asserted.

Warming to him for his pithy analysis of character, I enlarged upon my theme. "He rebukes MacLachan for past drunkenness. He mourns for Schepstein, who occasionally helps out a friend at ten per cent, as a usurer. He once accused old Madame Tallafferr of pride, but he'll never do that again. He calls the Little Red Doctor, our local physician, to account for profanity, and gets a fresh sample every time. Even against the Bonnie Lassie, whose sculptures you can just see in that little house near the corner"--I waved an illustrative hand--"he can quote Scripture, as to graven images. We all revere and respect and hate him. He's coming this way