He is buried in the little graveyard behind Redwine Church, along with most of the men and women to whom he preached in it thirty years ago.
I can feel that I am not setting things down right, not making the latitude and longitude of experience clearly so that you may see as I can when I close my eyes the staggering tombstones in the brown shadows behind the little brown church. But when one has been in the Methodist itinerancy a lifetime one cannot do that.
I used to wonder why Paul, passing through all the grandest cities and civilizations of his times, never left behind him a single description of any of their glories, only a reference to the altar to An Unknown God that he found in Athens; but now I know. Paul lost the memory of sight. He had absent-minded eyes to the things of the world. So it is with the itinerant. The earth becomes one of the stars. I cannot remember roads and realities. I recall most clearly only spiritual facts, like this: Timothy Brown was a bad man, soundly converted under William's ministry; but how he looked, on which circuit he lived, I have forgotten long ago.
In spite of a really well-settled, worldly mind William prayed away its foundations during those thirty years, until now the very scene of his passing floats a mist in memory. I know he lay in the same house where he had brought me on our wedding day. Through the window in the pearl light of the early morning there was the same freshness upon the hills, the same streams glistening like silver maces between; there was the same little valley below, fluted in like a cup filled with corn and honey and bees and flowers. The same gray farmhouses brooded close to the earth, with children playing in the dooryards. It was all there the morning he died, as it had been that blue and glad morning thirty years before; but I could not see it or feel it with him lying stretched and still upon the bed, with the sheet drawn over his face, and the people crowding in, whispering, shuffling, bearing the long, black coffin among them. I say, it is dim and blurred and I cannot think it or write it properly. There seemed a rime upon the window-panes; the hills were bare, and the cup of the valley lay drained and empty before me, with the shadow of death darkening all the light of the day.