The windows of his study looked out on the graveyard but , as he paced up and down the room , reflecting deeply on the immortality of the soul , he was quite unaware that Jerry and Carl were playing leap-frog hilariously over the flat stones in that abode of dead Methodists . Mr. Meredith had occasional acute realizations that his children were not so well looked after , physically or morally , as they had been before his wife died , and he had always a dim sub-consciousness that house and meals were very different under Aunt Martha 's management from what they had been under Cecilia 's . For the rest , he lived in a world of books and abstractions ; and , therefore , although his clothes were seldom brushed , and although the Glen housewives concluded , from the ivory-like pallor of his clear-cut features and slender hands , that he never got enough to eat , he was not an unhappy man . If ever a graveyard could be called a cheerful place , the old Methodist graveyard at Glen St. Mary might be so called . The new graveyard , at the other side of the Methodist church , was a neat and proper and doleful spot ; but the old one had been left so long to Nature 's kindly and gracious ministries that it had become very pleasant . It was surrounded on three sides by a dyke of stones and sod , topped by a gray and uncertain paling . Outside the dyke grew a row of tall fir trees with thick , balsamic boughs . The dyke , which had been built by the first settlers of the Glen , was old enough to be beautiful , with mosses and green things growing out of its crevices , violets purpling at its base in the early spring days , and asters and golden-rod making an autumnal glory in its corners . Little ferns clustered companionably between its stones , and here and there a big bracken grew . On the eastern side there was neither fence nor dyke . The graveyard there straggled off into a young fir plantation , ever pushing nearer to the graves and deepening eastward into a thick wood . The air was always full of the harp-like voices of the sea , and the music of gray old trees , and in the spring mornings the choruses of birds in the elms around the two churches sang of life and not of death . The Meredith children loved the old graveyard . Blue-eyed ivy , `` garden-spruce , '' and mint ran riot over the sunken graves . Blueberry bushes grew lavishly in the sandy corner next to the fir wood . The varying fashions of tombstones for three generations were to be found there , from the flat , oblong , red sandstone slabs of old settlers , down through the days of weeping willows and clasped hands , to the latest monstrosities of tall `` monuments '' and draped urns . One of the latter , the biggest and ugliest in the graveyard , was sacred to the memory of a certain Alec Davis who had been born a Methodist but had taken to himself a Presbyterian bride of the Douglas clan . She had made him turn Presbyterian and kept him toeing the Presbyterian mark all his life . But when he died she did not dare to doom him to a lonely grave in the Presbyterian graveyard over-harbour . His people were all buried in the Methodist cemetery ; so Alec Davis went back to his own in death and his widow consoled herself by erecting a monument which cost more than any of the Methodists could afford .
The Meredith children hated it , without just knowing why , but they loved the old , flat , bench-like stones XXXXX the tall grasses growing rankly about them .
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