el the dead bodies, lest their names
should be forgotten at the resurrection. Yet he had not failed, within
a narrow scope, to gather a few sprigs of earthly, and more than
earthly, wisdom--the harvest of many a grave. And, lugubrious as his
calling might appear, he was as cheerful an old soul as health and
integrity and lack of care could make him, and used to set to work
upon one sorrowful inscription or another with that sort of spirit
which impels a man to sing at his labor. On the whole, I found Mr.
Wigglesworth an entertaining, and often instructive, if not an
interesting, character; and, partly for the charm of his society, and
still more because his work has an invariable attraction for "man that
is born of woman," I was accustomed to spend some hours a day at his
workshop. The quaintness of his remarks and their not infrequent
truth--a truth condensed and pointed by the limited sphere of his
view--gave a raciness to his talk which mere worldliness and general
cultivation would at once have destroyed.

Sometimes we would discuss the respective merits of the various
qualities of marble, numerous slabs of which were resting against the
walls of the shop, or sometimes an hour or two would pass quietly
without a word on either side while I watched how neatly his chisel
struck out letter after letter of the names of the Nortons, the
Mayhews, the Luces, the Daggets, and other immemorial families of the
Vineyard. Often with an artist's pride the good old sculptor would
speak of favorite productions of his skill which were scattered
throughout the village graveyards of New England. But my chief and
most instructive amusement was to witness his interviews with his
customers, who held interminable consultations about the form and
fashion of the desired monuments, the buried excellence to be
commemorated, the anguish to be expressed, and finally the lowest
price in dollars and cents for which a marble transcript of their
feelings might be obtained. Really, my mind received many fresh ideas
which perhaps may remain in it even longer than Mr. Wigglesworth's
hardest marble will retain the deepest strokes of his chisel.

An elderly lady came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had
been killed by a whale in the Pacific Ocean no less than forty years
before. It was singular that so strong an impression of early feeling
should have survived through the changes of her subsequent life, in
the course of which she had bee