Sloppy, were the mourners at the lowly grave. Not a penny had been added to the money sewn in her dress: what her honest spirit had so long projected, was fulfilled.
“I’ve took it in my head,” said Sloppy, laying it, inconsolable, against the church door, when all was done: “I’ve took it in my wretched head that I might have sometimes turned a little harder for her, and it cuts me deep to think so now.”
The Reverend Frank Milvey, comforting Sloppy, expounded to him how the best of us were more or less remiss in our turnings at our respective Mangles—some of us very much so—and how we were all a halting, failing, feeble, and inconstant crew.
“ She warn’t, sir,” said Sloppy, taking this ghostly counsel rather ill, in behalf of his late benefactress. “Let us speak for ourselves, sir. She went through with whatever duty she had to do. She went through with me, she went through with the Minders, she went through with herself, she went through with everythink. O Mrs. Higden, Mrs. Higden, you was a woman and a mother and a mangler in a million million!”
With those heartfelt words, Sloppy removed his dejected head from the church door, and took it back to the grave in the corner, and laid it down there, and wept alone. “Not a very poor grave,” said the Reverend Frank Milvey, brushing his hand across his eyes, “when it has that homely figure on it. Richer, I think, than it could be made by most of the sculpture in Westminster Abbey!”
They left him undisturbed, and passed out at the wicket-gate. The waterwheel of the paper-mill was audible there, and seemed to have a softening influence on the bright wintry scene. They had arrived but a little while before, and Lizzie Hexam now told them the little she could add to the letter in which she had enclosed Mr. Rokesmith’s letter and had asked for their instructions. This was merely how she had heard the