Publisher's Synopsis
The scene would have gladdened a painter's heart. An old churchyard. The church low and squaretowered, with long mullioned windows, the yellow-grey stone roughened by age and tender-huedwith lichens. Round it clustered many tombstones tilted in all directions. Behind the church a lineof gnarled and twisted yews.The churchyard was full of fine trees. On one side a magnificent cedar; on the other a great copperbeech. Here and there among the tombs and headstones many beautiful blossoming trees rose fromthe long green grass. The laburnum glowed in the June afternoon sunlight; the lilac, the hawthornand the clustering meadowsweet which fringed the edge of the lazy stream mingled their heavysweetness in sleepy fragrance. The yellow-grey crumbling walls were green in places with wrinkledharts-tongues, and were topped with sweet-williams and spreading house-leek and stone-crop andwild-flowers whose delicious sweetness made for the drowsy repose of perfect summer.