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 with the tall grasses growing rankly about them . They made jolly seats for one thing . They were all sitting on one now . Jerry , tired of leap frog , was playing on a jew 's - harp . Carl was lovingly poring over a strange beetle he had found ; Una was trying to make a doll 's dress , and Faith , leaning back on her slender brown wrists , was swinging her bare feet in lively time to the jew 's - harp . Jerry had his father 's black hair and large black eyes , but in him the latter were flashing instead of dreamy . Faith , who came next to him , wore her beauty like a rose , careless and glowing . She had golden-brown eyes , golden-brown curls and crimson cheeks . She laughed too much to please her father 's congregation and had shocked old Mrs. Taylor , the disconsolate spouse of several departed husbands , by saucily declaring -- in the church-porch at that -- `` The world IS N'T a vale of tears , Mrs. Taylor . It 's a world of laughter . ''
Little dreamy Una was not given XXXXX laughter .
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