utterly lost the holy sense of
individuality in wedlock that methought he was fain to reckon upon his
fingers how many women who had once slept by his side were now
sleeping in their graves. There was even--if I wrong him, it is no
great matter--a glance sidelong at his living spouse, as if he were
inclined to drive a thriftier bargain by bespeaking four gravestones
in a lot.

I was better pleased with a rough old whaling-captain who gave
directions for a broad marble slab divided into two compartments, one
of which was to contain an epitaph on his deceased wife and the other
to be left vacant till death should engrave his own name there. As is
frequently the case among the whalers of Martha's Vineyard, so much of
this storm-beaten widower's life had been tossed away on distant seas
that out of twenty years of matrimony he had spent scarce three, and
those at scattered intervals, beneath his own roof. Thus the wife of
his youth, though she died in his and her declining age, retained the
bridal dewdrops fresh around her memory.

My observations gave me the idea, and Mr. Wigglesworth confirmed it,
that husbands were more faithful in setting up memorials to their dead
wives than widows to their dead husbands. I was not ill-natured enough
to fancy that women less than men feel so sure of their own constancy
as to be willing to give a pledge of it in marble. It is more probably
the fact that, while men are able to reflect upon their lost
companions as remembrances apart from themselves, women, on the other
hand, are conscious that a portion of their being has gone with the
departed whithersoever he has gone. Soul clings to soul, the living
dust has a sympathy with the dust of the grave; and by the very
strength of that sympathy the wife of the dead shrinks the more
sensitively from reminding the world of its existence. The link is
already strong enough; it needs no visible symbol. And, though a
shadow walks ever by her side and the touch of a chill hand is on her
bosom, yet life, and perchance its natural yearnings, may still be
warm within her and inspire her with new hopes of happiness. Then
would she mark out the grave the scent of which would be perceptible
on the pillow of the second bridal? No, but rather level its green
mound with the surrounding earth, as if, when she dug up again her
buried heart, the spot had ceased to be a grave.

Yet, in spite of these sentimentalities, I was prodigiously amused by
an incide