actory as was the officious "deed without a
name" done in orderly Boston, where, in the first half of this century,
a precise Superintendent of Graveyards and his army of assistants--what
Charles Lamb called "sapient trouble-tombs"--straightened out
mathematically all the old burial-places, levelled the earth, and set in
trim military rows the old slate headstones, regardless of the irregular
clusters of graves and their occupants.

And there in Boston the falsifying old headstones still stand, fixed in
new places, but marking no coffins or honored bones beneath; the only
true words of their inscriptions being the opening ones "Here lies," and
the motto that they repeat derisively to each other--"As you are now so
once was I."

In many communities each family had its own burying-place in some corner
of the home farm, sometimes at the foot of garden or orchard. Such is
noticeably the case throughout Narragansett; almost every farm has a
grave-yard, now generally unused and deserted. Sometimes the
burying-place is enclosed by a high mossy stone wall, often it is
overgrown with dense sombre firs or hemlocks, or half shaded with airy
locust-trees. Beautifully ideal and touching is the thought of these
old Narragansett planters resting with their wives and children in the
ground they so dearly loved and so faithfully worked for.

A vast similarity of design existed in the early gravestones.
Originality of inscription, carving, size, or material was evidently
frowned upon as frivolous, undignified, and eccentric--even
disrespectful. A few of the early settlers used freestone or sienite, or
a native porphyritic green stone called beech-bowlder. Sandstone was
rarely employed, for though easily carved, it as easily yielded to New
England frosts and storms. A hard, dark, flinty slate-stone from North
Wales was commonly used, a stone so hard and so enduring that when our
modern granite and marble monuments are crumbled in the dust I believe
these old slate headstones still will speak their warning words of many
centuries.

"As I am now so you shall be,
Prepare for Death & follow me."

These stones were imported from England ready carved. A high duty was
placed on them, and a Boston sea captain endeavored and was caught in
the attempt to bring into port, free of duty, for one of his friends,
one of these carved slate gravestones, by entering it as a
winding-sheet. It is one of the curiosities of New England commercia