n a wife and a mother, and, so far as I
could judge, a comfortable and happy woman. Reflecting within myself,
it appeared to me that this lifelong sorrow--as, in all good faith,
she deemed it--was one of the most fortunate circumstances of her
history. It had given an ideality to her mind; it had kept her purer
and less earthy than she would otherwise have been by drawing a
portion of her sympathies apart from earth. Amid the throng of
enjoyments and the pressure of worldly care and all the warm
materialism of this life she had communed with a vision, and had been
the better for such intercourse. Faithful to the husband of her
maturity, and loving him with a far more real affection than she ever
could have felt for this dream of her girlhood, there had still been
an imaginative faith to the ocean-buried; so that an ordinary
character had thus been elevated and refined. Her sighs had been the
breath of Heaven to her soul. The good lady earnestly desired that the
proposed monument should be ornamented with a carved border of marine
plants interwined with twisted sea-shells, such as were probably
waving over her lover's skeleton or strewn around it in the far depths
of the Pacific. But, Mr. Wigglesworth's chisel being inadequate to the
task, she was forced to content herself with a rose hanging its head
from a broken stem.

After her departure I remarked that the symbol was none of the most
apt.

"And yet," said my friend the sculptor, embodying in this image the
thoughts that had been passing through my own mind, "that broken rose
has shed its sweet smell through forty years of the good woman's
life."

It was seldom that I could find such pleasant food for contemplation
as in the above instance. None of the applicants, I think, affected me
more disagreeably than an old man who came, with his fourth wife
hanging on his arm, to bespeak gravestones for the three former
occupants of his marriage-bed. I watched with some anxiety to see
whether his remembrance of either were more affectionate than of the
other two, but could discover no symptom of the kind. The three
monuments were all to be of the same material and form, and each
decorated in bas-relief with two weeping willows, one of these
sympathetic trees bending over its fellow, which was to be broken in
the midst and rest upon a sepulchral urn. This, indeed, was Mr.
Wigglesworth's standing emblem of conjugal bereavement. I shuddered at
the gray polygamist who had so