nt of which I had not the good-fortune to be a witness, but
which Mr. Wigglesworth related with considerable humor. A gentlewoman
of the town, receiving news of her husband's loss at sea, had bespoken
a handsome slab of marble, and came daily to watch the progress of my
friend's chisel. One afternoon, when the good lady and the sculptor
were in the very midst of the epitaph--which the departed spirit might
have been greatly comforted to read--who should walk into the workshop
but the deceased himself, in substance as well as spirit! He had been
picked up at sea, and stood in no present need of tombstone or
epitaph.

"And how," inquired I, "did his wife bear the shock of joyful
surprise?"

"Why," said the old man, deepening the grin of a death's-head on which
his chisel was just then employed, "I really felt for the poor woman;
it was one of my best pieces of marble--and to be thrown away on a
living man!"

A comely woman with a pretty rosebud of a daughter came to select a
gravestone for a twin-daughter, who had died a month before. I was
impressed with the different nature of their feelings for the dead.
The mother was calm and woefully resigned, fully conscious of her
loss, as of a treasure which she had not always possessed, and
therefore had been aware that it might be taken from her; but the
daughter evidently had no real knowledge of what Death's doings were.
Her thoughts knew, but not her heart. It seemed to me that by the
print and pressure which the dead sister had left upon the survivor's
spirit her feelings were almost the same as if she still stood side by
side and arm in arm with the departed, looking at the slabs of marble,
and once or twice she glanced around with a sunny smile, which, as its
sister-smile had faded for ever, soon grew confusedly overshadowed.
Perchance her consciousness was truer than her reflection; perchance
her dead sister was a closer companion than in life.

The mother and daughter talked a long while with Mr. Wigglesworth
about a suitable epitaph, and finally chose an ordinary verse of
ill-matched rhymes which had already been inscribed upon innumerable
tombstones. But when we ridicule the triteness of monumental verses,
we forget that Sorrow reads far deeper in them than we can, and finds
a profound and individual purport in what seems so vague and
inexpressive unless interpreted by her. She makes the epitaph anew,
though the selfsame words may have served for a thousand grave