MR. SMEETH IS WORRIED 491

He had been this way before, many a time, in fact, but
he never remembered noticing before that the earth of
the burying-ground was high above the street. The
railings were fastened into a wall between two or three
feet high, and the ground of the cemetery was as high
as the top of this little wall There was something very
mournful about the sooty soil, through which only a few
miserable blades of grass found their way* It was very
untidy. There were bits of paper there, broken twigs,
rope ends, squashed cigarettes, dried orange peel, and a
battered tin that apparently had once contained Palm
Chocolate Nougat. This ding)' litter at the foot of the
grave-stones made him feel sad. It was as if the paper
and cigarette ends and the empty tin, there in the old
cemetery, only marked in their shabby fashion the pass-
ing of a later life, as if the twentieth century was burying
itself in there too, and not even doing it decently. He
moved a step or two, then stopped near the open space,
where there is a public path across the burying-ground.
He stared at the mouldering headstones. Many of them
were curiously bright? as if their stone were faintly
luminous in the gathering darkness, but it was hard to
decipher their lettering. One of them, which attracted
his attention because it was not upright in the ground
but leaned over at a very decided angle, he found he
could read: In Memory of Mr. John Willm. Hill, -who
died May z6th} 1790, in the eighteenth year of his age.
That had been a poor look-out for somebody.

" 'Aving a look at the good old graves, mister?" said a
voice. It belonged to an elderly and shabby idler, one
of those dreamy and dilapidated men who seem to haunt
all such places in London, and who will offer to guide
you, if you are obviously a stranger and well to do, but