The Uncommercial Traveller | Page 5

have been reburied in
private graves, so that the mourners might erect separate headstones

over the remains. In all such cases he had performed the funeral service
a second time, and the ladies of his house had attended. There had been
no offence in the poor ashes when they were brought again to the light
of day; the beneficent Earth had already absorbed it. The drowned were
buried in their clothes. To supply the great sudden demand for coffins,
he had got all the neighbouring people handy at tools, to work the
livelong day, and Sunday likewise. The coffins were neatly formed;--I
had seen two, waiting for occupants, under the lee of the ruined walls
of a stone hut on the beach, within call of the tent where the Christmas
Feast was held. Similarly, one of the graves for four was lying open
and ready, here, in the churchyard. So much of the scanty space was
already devoted to the wrecked people, that the villagers had begun to
express uneasy doubts whether they themselves could lie in their own
ground, with their forefathers and descendants, by-and-by. The
churchyard being but a step from the clergyman's dwelling-house, we
crossed to the latter; the white surplice was hanging up near the door
ready to be put on at any time, for a funeral service.
The cheerful earnestness of this good Christian minister was as
consolatory, as the circumstances out of which it shone were sad. I
never have seen anything more delightfully genuine than the calm
dismissal by himself and his household of all they had undergone, as a
simple duty that was quietly done and ended. In speaking of it, they
spoke of it with great compassion for the bereaved; but laid no stress
upon their own hard share in those weary weeks, except as it had
attached many people to them as friends, and elicited many touching
expressions of gratitude. This clergyman's brother--himself the
clergyman of two adjoining parishes, who had buried thirty-four of the
bodies in his own churchyard, and who had done to them all that his
brother had done as to the larger number- -must be understood as
included in the family. He was there, with his neatly arranged papers,
and made no more account of his trouble than anybody else did. Down
to yesterday's post outward, my clergyman alone had written one
thousand and seventy-five letters to relatives and friends of the lost
people. In the absence of self-assertion, it was only through my now
and then delicately putting a question as the occasion arose, that I
became informed of these things. It was only when I had remarked

again and again, in the church, on the awful nature of the scene of death
he had been required so closely to familiarise himself with for the
soothing of the living, that he had casually said, without the least
abatement of his cheerfulness, 'indeed, it had rendered him unable for a
time to eat or drink more than a little coffee now and then, and a piece
of bread.'
In this noble modesty, in this beautiful simplicity, in this serene
avoidance of the least attempt to 'improve' an occasion which might be
supposed to have sunk of its own weight into my heart, I seemed to
have happily come, in a few steps, from the churchyard with its open
grave, which was the type of Death, to the Christian dwelling side by
side with it, which was the type of Resurrection. I never shall think of
the former, without the latter. The two will always rest side by side in
my memory. If I had lost any one dear to me in this unfortunate ship, if
I had made a voyage from Australia to look at the grave in the
churchyard, I should go away, thankful to GOD that that house was so
close to it, and that its shadow by day and its domestic lights by night
fell upon the earth in which its Master had so tenderly laid my dear
one's head.
The references that naturally arose out of our conversation, to the
descriptions sent down of shipwrecked persons, and to the gratitude of
relations and friends, made me very anxious to see some of those letters.
I was presently seated before a shipwreck of papers, all bordered with
black, and from them I made the following few extracts.
A mother writes:
REVEREND SIR. Amongst the many who perished on your shore was
numbered my beloved son. I was only just recovering from a severe
illness, and this fearful affliction has caused a relapse, so that I am
unable at present to go to identify the remains of the loved and lost. My
darling son would have been sixteen on Christmas-day next. He was a
most amiable