'
When your humble servant, Charles de Cresseron, the compiler of this
narrative, was a boy some fourteen years old--how long ago precisely
that was, is nothing to the purpose, 'tis enough to say he remembers
what he then saw and heard a good deal better than what happened a week
ago--it came to pass that he was spending a pleasant week of his
holidays with his benign uncle and godfather, the curate of Chapelizod.
On the second day of his, or rather _my_ sojourn (I take leave to return
to the first person), there was a notable funeral of an old lady. Her
name was Darby, and her journey to her last home was very considerable,
being made in a hearse, by easy stages, from her house of Lisnabane, in
the county of Sligo, to the church-yard of Chapelizod. There was a great
flat stone over that small parcel of the rector's freehold, which the
family held by a tenure, not of lives, but of deaths, renewable for
ever. So that my uncle, who was a man of an anxious temperament, had
little trouble in satisfying himself of the meerings and identity of
this narrow tenement, to which Lemuel Mattocks, the sexton, led him as
straight and confidently as he could have done to the communion-table.
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