to the feast. Strange that they should appear as proxies for the dead and eat for them. A beautiful reminder that in the living we find all our dead again.
We had stood to meet the priest and to give the beggars the food we had brought, so now that the beggars had eaten all the rice and raisins and rice and jam and had gone farther to eat at other graves, we sat down again in the still presence of the green mound and we talked of the virtues of the dead one, of how old she would have been and how beloved she was, and of how often she had been remembered, and how soon we should join her. Evidently the mother assumed that what she said was heard by her whose body lay in the earth. We were all quietly joyful—not sad. We had the spirit of children making believe; we had also the calm faith and knowledge of elders—that there is no death, that those who have passed out of sight have not ceased but are alive for evermore. I felt the Russians, and indeed mankind altogether, to be very dear at this festival; they were doing things that must touch those invisible ones who know more than we do and look on, bring tears to the eyes of angels, and not as often in man's history and the spectacle of his civilisation and abomination call down the wrath of higher powers.
We talked . . . and then as we became silent again we heard the music of man's life, and listened with our souls.
