Blithedale, thus far in its progress, had never found the necessity of

a burial-ground. There was some consultation among us in what spot

Zenobia might most fitly be laid. It was my own wish that she should

sleep at the base of Eliot's pulpit, and that on the rugged front of

the rock the name by which we familiarly knew her, Zenobia,--and not

another word, should be deeply cut, and left for the moss and lichens

to fill up at their long leisure. But Hollingsworth (to whose ideas on

this point great deference was due) made it his request that her grave

might be dug on the gently sloping hillside, in the wide pasture,

where, as we once supposed, Zenobia and he had planned to build their

cottage. And thus it was done, accordingly.

She was buried very much as other people have been for hundreds of

years gone by. In anticipation of a death, we Blithedale colonists had

sometimes set our fancies at work to arrange a funereal ceremony, which

should be the proper symbolic expression of our spiritual faith and

eternal hopes; and this we meant to substitute for those customary

rites which were moulded originally out of the Gothic gloom, and by

long use, like an old velvet pall, have so much more than their first

death-smell in them. But when the occasion came we found it the

simplest and truest thing, after all, to content ourselves with the old

fashion, taking away what we could, but interpolating no novelties, and

particularly avoiding all frippery of flowers and cheerful emblems.

The procession moved from the farmhouse. Nearest the dead walked an

old man in deep mourning, his face mostly concealed in a white

handkerchief, and with Priscilla leaning on his arm. Hollingsworth and

myself came next. We all stood around the narrow niche in the cold

earth; all saw the coffin lowered in; all heard the rattle of the

crumbly soil upon its lid,--that final sound, which mortality awakens

on the utmost verge of sense, as if in the vain hope of bringing an

echo from the spiritual world.

I noticed a stranger,--a stranger to most of those present, though

known to me,--who, after the coffin had descended, took up a handful of

earth and flung it first into the grave. I had given up

Hollingsworth's arm, and now found myself near this man.

"It was an idle thing--a foolish thing--for Zenobia to do," said he.

"She was the last woman in the world to whom death could have been

necessary. It was too absurd! I have no patience with her."




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