Page:Annalsoffaminein00nich.djvu/144

138 elevated or cemented. We waited a few moments till the sister, who sat down upon the grave of the little one, had indulged her grief for the two departed, and I only heard her say, "Ah! and you will not speak to me." An ancient abbey was near, said to be a thousand years old; and so closely had the Catholics buried their dead there that it appeared at a little distance, like one vast pile of stones tumbled together. The Protestants and Romanists do not choose to place their dead in contact; and these two were distinct; but they, also, had their "respectable monuments," for we saw, on a nearer approach, that this grave-yard had elevated cemented tombstones; the ground was high, and no walls, but the roaring old sea upon one side—which sometimes boldly reaches out and snatches a sleeper from his bed. The scattered bones that lay about, told that it must long have been the "place of skulls." The last year had made great accessions to the pile, which could easily be known by their freshness, and ropes of straw and undried grass brought here by relatives, to put over the uncoffined bodies of their friends. Here were deposited five or six sailors, belonging to a vessel from Greenock, which was wrecked on this coast the preceding spring. The bodies washed ashore, and a brother of the lady with me dug a pit and put them in, spreading over their faces the skirt of one of their overcoats, "to screen," as he said, "the cruel clay from their eyes." These poor sailors, unknown and unwept, were buried by the hand of a stranger, on a foreign shore; but somewhere