at ivy away and you can read the
inscription. Did you ever hear of him?"

It was a plain, heavy slab placed horizontally, and the ivy had so run
over it that the white of the marble was nearly obscured. But I made out
this inscription:

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Born July 18, 1811
Died Dec. 24, 1863
ANNE CARMICHAEL SMYTH
Died Dec. 18, 1864, aged 72--his mother
by her first marriage

The unpoetic exactness of that pedigree gave me a slight chill. But here
they sleep--mother and son in one grave. She who gave him his first
caress also gave him his last; and when he was found dead in his bed, his
mother, who lived under the same roof, was the first one called. He was
the child of her girlhood--she was scarcely twenty when she bore him. In
life they were never separated, and in death they are not divided. It is
as both desired.

Thackeray was born in India, and was brought to England on the death of
his father, when he was six years of age. On the way from Calcutta the
ship touched at the Island of Saint Helena. A servant took the lad ashore
and they walked up the rocky heights to Longwood, and there, pacing back
and forth in a garden, they saw a short, stout man.

"Lookee, lad, lookee quick--that's him! He eats three sheep every day and
all the children he can get!"

"And that's all I had to do with the Battle of Waterloo," said "Old
Thack," forty years after. But you will never believe it after reading
those masterly touches concerning the battle, in "Vanity Fair."

Young Thackeray was sent to the Charterhouse School, where he was
considered rather a dull boy. He was big and good-natured, and read
novels when he should have studied arithmetic. This tendency to "play
off" stuck to him at Cambridge--where he did not remain long enough to
get a degree, but to the relief of his tutors went off on a tour through
Europe.

Travel as a means of education is a very seductive bit of sophistry.
Invalids whom the doctors can not cure, and scholars whom teachers can
not teach, are often advised to take "a change." Still there is reason in
it.

In England Thackeray was intent on law; at Paris he received a strong
bent toward art; but when he reached Weimar and was introduced at the
Court of Letters and came into the living presence of Goethe, he caught
the infection and made a plan for translating Schiller.

Schiller dead was considered in Germany a greater man than Goethe living,
as if it were