Mrs. Baskerville left a spoon in the large beef-steak pudding and read her brother-in-law's letter, while a cloud of steam ascended to the kitchen ceiling.
"You ask me to come and eat my dinner with you on the twenty-eighth day of June next, because on that day you will be up home seventy years old. If you think 'tis a fine thing to find yourself past three score and ten--well, perhaps it is. You can't go on much longer, anyway, and journey's end is no hardship. At a first thought I should have reckoned such a birthday wasn't much to rejoice over; but you're right and I'm wrong. A man may pride himself on getting so well through with the bulk of his life and reaching nigh the finish with so few thorns in his feet and aches in his heart as what you have. I'll come.
"Yours faithfully, "HUMPHREY BASKERVILLE."
A mournful sound like the wind in the trees went up from Uncle Humphrey's nephews and nieces.
"Perhaps he won't come after all, when he hears Uncle Nat is coming," suggested May. She was always hopeful.
Mrs. Baskerville turned and put the letter on the mantel-shelf behind an eight-day clock. Then she sat down and began to help the pudding.
"We must make him as welcome as we can, for father's sake," she said.
The hamlet of Shaugh Prior, a gift to the monks of Plympton in time past, stands beneath Shaugh Moor at the edge of a mighty declivity. The Church of St. Edward lifts its battlemented tower and crocketed pinnacles above a world of waste and fallow. It is perched upon a ridge and stands, supported by trees and a few cottages, in a position of great prominence. The scant beauty that this holy place possessed has vanished under restoration; but there yet remain good bells, while a notable font-cover, cast forth by vanished vandals, is now returned to its use.
Round about the church dark sycamores shine in spring, and at autumn drop their patched and mottled foliage upon the dust of the dead. Broad-bosomed fields ascend to the south; easterly a high road climbs to the Moor, and immediately north of Shaugh the slopes of High Down lead by North Wood to Cadworthy Farm and Cadworthy Bridge beyond it.
From High Down the village and its outlying habitations may be perceived at a glance. The cots and homesteads converge and cluster in, with the church as the central point and heart of the organisation. Around it dwellers from afar are come to sleep through their eternal night, and a double row of slates, like an amulet, girdles the ancient fane. Here and there flash white marble in the string of grey above the graves of the people; and beside the churchyard wall stand heaped a pack of Time's playing cards--old, thin, and broken slates from graves forgotten--slates and shattered slabs that have fallen away from the unremembered dust they chronicled, and now follow into oblivion the bones they marked.