Chapter 5 - Page 2

the pediment of a tomb; there,
where the street falls far below the level of the graves,
a chimney has been trained up the back of a monument, and
a red pot looks vulgarly over from behind. A damp smell
of the graveyard finds its way into houses where workmen
sit at meat. Domestic life on a small scale goes forward
visibly at the windows. The very solitude and stillness
of the enclosure, which lies apart from the town's
traffic, serves to accentuate the contrast. As you walk
upon the graves, you see children scattering crumbs to
feed the sparrows; you hear people singing or washing
dishes, or the sound of tears and castigation; the linen
on a clothes-pole flaps against funereal sculpture; or
perhaps the cat slips over the lintel and descends on a
memorial urn. And as there is nothing else astir, these
incongruous sights and noises take hold on the attention
and exaggerate the sadness of the place.

Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats. I have
seen one afternoon, as many as thirteen of them seated on
the grass beside old Milne, the Master Builder, all sleek
and fat, and complacently blinking, as if they had fed
upon strange meats. Old Milne was chaunting with the
saints, as we may hope, and cared little for the company
about his grave; but I confess the spectacle had an ugly
side for me; and I was glad to step forward and raise my
eyes to where the Castle and the roofs of the Old Town,
and the spire of the Assembly Hall, stood deployed
against the sky with the colourless precision of
engraving. An open outlook is to be desired from a
churchyard, and a sight of the sky and some of the
world's beauty relieves a mind from morbid thoughts.

I shall never forget one visit. It was a grey,
dropping day; the grass was strung with rain-drops; and
the people in the houses kept hanging out their shirts
and petticoats and angrily taking them in again, as the
weather turned from wet to fair and back again. A grave-
digger, and a friend of his, a gardener from the country,
accompanied me into one after another of the cells and
little courtyards in which it gratified the wealthy of
old days to enclose their old bones from neighbourhood.
In one, under a sort of shrine, we found a forlorn human
effigy, very realistically executed down to the detail of
his ribbed stockings, and holding in his hand a ticket
with the date of his demise. He looked most pitiful and
ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic
precinct, like a bad old boy or an inferior forgotten
deity under a new dispensation; the burdocks grew
familiarly about his feet, the rain dripped all round
him; and the world maintained the most entire
indifference as to who he was or whither he had gone.