s.

"And yet," said I afterward to Mr. Wigglesworth, "they might have made
a better choice than this. While you were discussing the subject I was
struck by at least a dozen simple and natural expressions from the
lips of both mother and daughter. One of these would have formed an
inscription equally original and appropriate."

"No, no!" replied the sculptor, shaking his head; "there is a good
deal of comfort to be gathered from these little old scraps of poetry,
and so I always recommend them in preference to any new-fangled ones.
And somehow they seem to stretch to suit a great grief and shrink to
fit a small one."

It was not seldom that ludicrous images were excited by what took
place between Mr. Wigglesworth and his customers. A shrewd gentlewoman
who kept a tavern in the town was anxious to obtain two or three
gravestones for the deceased members of her family, and to pay for
these solemn commodities by taking the sculptor to board. Hereupon a
fantasy arose in my mind of good Mr. Wigglesworth sitting down to
dinner at a broad, flat tombstone carving one of his own plump little
marble cherubs, gnawing a pair of crossbones and drinking out of a
hollow death's-head or perhaps a lachrymatory vase or sepulchral urn,
while his hostess's dead children waited on him at the ghastly
banquet. On communicating this nonsensical picture to the old man he
laughed heartily and pronounced my humor to be of the right sort.

"I have lived at such a table all my days," said he, "and eaten no
small quantity of slate and marble."

"Hard fare," rejoined I, smiling, "but you seemed to have found it
excellent of digestion, too."

A man of fifty or thereabouts with a harsh, unpleasant countenance
ordered a stone for the grave of his bitter enemy, with whom he had
waged warfare half a lifetime, to their mutual misery and ruin. The
secret of this phenomenon was that hatred had become the sustenance
and enjoyment of the poor wretch's soul; it had supplied the place of
all kindly affections; it had been really a bond of sympathy between
himself and the man who shared the passion; and when its object died,
the unappeasable foe was the only mourner for the dead. He expressed a
purpose of being buried side by side with his enemy.

"I doubt whether their dust will mingle," remarked the old sculptor to
me; for often there was an earthliness in his conceptions.

"Oh yes," replied I, who had mused long upon the incident; "and when
they rise