al of the human form as a sanitary
improvement, it would be better to clear the streets and "commons" of our
cities of their pestiferous surroundings. Try your cremation on the dogs
and cats with extinct animation.

We think Greenwood is healthier than Broadway, and Laurel Hill than
Chestnut street, Pere la Chaise than Champs Elysees. Urns, with ashes
scientifically prepared, may look very well in Madras or Pekin, but not in
a Christian country. Not having been able to shake off the Bible notions
about Christian burial, we adhere to the mode that was observed when devout
men carried Stephen to his burial. Better not come around here with your
chemical apparatus for the reduction of the human body. I give fair warning
that if your philosopher attempts such a process on my bones, and I am of
the same way of thinking as now, he will be sorry for it.

But I have no fear that I shall thus be desecrated by my surviving friends.
I have more fear of epitaphs. I do not wonder that people have sometimes
dictated the inscription on their own tombstones when I see what
inappropriate lines are chiseled on many a slab. There needs to be a
reformation in epitaphiology.

People often ask me for appropriate inscriptions for the graves of their
dead. They tell the virtues of the father, or wife, or child, and want me
to put in compressed shape all that catalogue of excellences.

Of course I fail in the attempt. The story of a lifetime cannot be chiseled
by the stone-cutter on the side of a marble slab. But it is not a rare
thing to go a few months after by the sacred spot and find that the bereft
friends, unable to get from others an epitaph sufficiently eulogistic, have
put their own brain and heart to work and composed a rhyme. Now, the most
unfit sphere on earth for an inexperienced mind to exercise the poetic
faculty is in epitaphiology. It does very well in copy-books, but it is
most unfair to blot the resting-place of the dead with unskilled poetic
scribble. It seems to me that the owners of cemeteries and graveyards
should keep in their own hand the right to refuse inappropriate and
ludicrous epitaph.

Nine-tenths of those who think they can write respectable poetry are
mistaken. I do not say that poesy has passed from the earth, but it does
seem as if the fountain Hippocrene had been drained off to run a saw-mill.
It is safe to say that most of the home-made poetry of graveyards is an
offence to God and man.

One would have