t wealth, which he had accumulated by the exercise
of strong and shrewd faculties combined with a most penurious
disposition. This wretched miser, conscious that he had not a friend
to be mindful of him in his grave, had himself taken the needful
precautions for posthumous remembrance by bespeaking an immense slab
of white marble with a long epitaph in raised letters, the whole to be
as magnificent as Mr. Wigglesworth's skill could make it. There was
something very characteristic in this contrivance to have his money's
worth even from his own tombstone, which, indeed, afforded him more
enjoyment in the few months that he lived thereafter than it probably
will in a whole century, now that it is laid over his bones.

This incident reminds me of a young girl--a pale, slender, feeble
creature most unlike the other rosy and healthful damsels of the
Vineyard, amid whose brightness she was fading away. Day after day did
the poor maiden come to the sculptor's shop and pass from one piece of
marble to another, till at last she pencilled her name upon a slender
slab which, I think, was of a more spotless white than all the rest. I
saw her no more, but soon afterward found Mr. Wigglesworth cutting her
virgin-name into the stone which she had chosen.

"She is dead, poor girl!" said he, interrupting the tune which he was
whistling, "and she chose a good piece of stuff for her headstone.
Now, which of these slabs would you like best to see your own name
upon?"

"Why, to tell you the truth, my good Mr. Wigglesworth," replied I,
after a moment's pause, for the abruptness of the question had
somewhat startled me--"to be quite sincere with you, I care little or
nothing about a stone for my own grave, and am somewhat inclined to
scepticism as to the propriety of erecting monuments at all over the
dust that once was human. The weight of these heavy marbles, though
unfelt by the dead corpse or the enfranchised soul, presses drearily
upon the spirit of the survivor and causes him to connect the idea of
death with the dungeon-like imprisonment of the tomb, instead of with
the freedom of the skies. Every gravestone that you ever made is the
visible symbol of a mistaken system. Our thoughts should soar upward
with the butterfly, not linger with the exuviae that confined him. In
truth and reason, neither those whom we call the living, and still
less the departed, have anything to do with the grave."

"I never heard anything so heathenish," s