dren and
servants that followed the coffin through the streets.

Some attempt was made to regulate funeral expenses. In Salem a tolling
of the bell could cost but eightpence, and "the sextons are desired to
toll the bells but four strokes in a minute." The undertakers could
charge but eight shillings for borrowing chairs, waiting on the
pall-holders, and notifying relatives to attend.

The early graves were frequently clustered, were even crowded in
irregular groups in the churchyard; and in larger towns, the
dead--especially persons of dignity--were buried, as in England, under
the church. Sargent, in his "Dealings with the Dead," speaks at length
of the latter custom, which prevailed to an inordinate extent in Boston.
In smaller settlements some out-of-the-way spot was chosen for a common
burial-place, in barren pasture or on lonely hillside, thus forcibly
proving the well-known lines of Whittier,

"Our vales are sweet with fern and rose,
Our hills are maple crowned,
But not from them our fathers chose
The village burial ground.

"The dreariest spot in all the land
To Death they set apart;
With scanty grace from Nature's hand
And none from that of Art."

To the natural loneliness of the country burial-place and to its
inevitable sadness, is now too frequently added the gloomy and
depressing evidence of human neglect. Briers and weeds grow in tangled
thickets over the forgotten graves; birch-trees and barberry bushes
spring up unchecked. In one a thriving grove of lilac bushes spreads its
dusty shade from wall to wall. Winter-killed shrubs of flowering almond
or snowballs, planted in tender memory, stand now withered and unheeded,
and the few straggling garden flowers--crimson phlox or single
hollyhocks--that still live only painfully accent the loneliness by
showing that this now forgotten spot was once loved, visited, and cared
for.

In many cases the worn gravestone lies forlornly face downward;
sometimes,

"The slab has sunk; the head declined,
And left the rails a wreck behind.
No names; you trace a '6'--a '7,'
Part of 'affliction' and of 'Heaven.'
And then in letters sharp and clear,
You read.--O Irony austere!--
'Tho' lost to Sight, to Memory dear.'"

"Truly our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly
show us how we may be buried in our survivors.'" Still, this neglect and
oblivion is just as satisf