The lake curves inland, forming a pleasant bay among the woods; there is a sandy spit where some pines have found roothold, and they live on somehow despite the harsh sallies of the wind in winter. Along the shore dead reeds lie in rows three feet deep among the rushes; had they been placed there by hand they could not have been placed with more regularity; and there is an old cart-track, with hawthorns growing out of a tumbled wall. The hillside is planted--beautiful beeches and hollies at one end, and at the other some lawny interspaces with tall larches swaying tasselled branches shedding faint shadows. These were the wonder of my childhood. A path leads through the wood, and under the rugged pine somebody has placed a seat, a roughly hewn stone supported by two upright stones. For some reason unknown to me this seat always suggested, even when I was a child, a pilgrim's seat. I suppose the suggestion came from the knowledge that my grandmother used to go every day to the tomb at the end of the wood where her husband and sons lay, and whither she was taken herself long ago when I was in frocks; and twenty years after my father was taken there.
What a ceaseless recurrence of the same things! A hearse will appear again in a few days, perhaps the same hearse, the horses covered up with black made to look ridiculous with voluminous weed, the coachman no better than a zany, the ominous superior mute directing the others with a wand; there will be a procession of relatives and friends, all wearing crepe and black gloves, and most of them thinking how soon they can get back to their business: that masquerade which we call a funeral!
Fearing premature burial (a very common fear), my mother had asked that her burial should be postponed until a natural change in the elements of her body should leave no doubt that life no longer lingered there. And the interval between her death and her burial I spent along the lake's shore. The same weather continued day after day, and it is almost impossible to find words to express the beauty of the grey reflection of the islands and the reeds, and the faint evanescent shores floating away, disappearing in the sun-haze, and the silence about the shores, a kind of enchanted silence, interrupted, as I have said, only by the low gurgle of the water about the limestone shingle. Now and then the song of a bird would break out, and all was silence again.... "A silence that seems to come out of the very heart of things!" I said, and I stopped to listen, like one at the world's end; I walked on, wondering, through the rushes and tussocked grass and juniper bushes which grew along the wilding shore, along the edge of the wood. Coming from the town, I could not but admire the emptiness of the country; hardly ever did I hear the sound of a human voice or a footstep; only once did I meet some wood-gatherers, poor women carrying bundles of faggots, bent under their loads. And thinking that perchance I knew them--they were evidently from the village; if so, I must have known them when I was a boy--I was suddenly seized by an unaccountable dread or a shyness, occasioned no doubt by the sense of the immense difference that time had effected in us: they were the same, but I was different. The books I had pondered and the pictures I had seen had estranged me from them, simple souls that they were; and the consciousness of the injustice of the human lot made it a pain to me to look into their eyes. So I was glad to be able to pass behind some bushes, and to escape into the wood without their perceiving me.