l
enterprises, that for many years gravestones should have been imported
to New England, a land that fairly bristles with stone and rock
thrusting itself through the earth and waiting to be carved.

The Welsh stones were made of a universal pattern--a carved top with a
space enclosing a miserable death's or winged cherub's head as a
heading, a border of scrolls down either side of the inscription, and
rarely a design at the base. Weeping willows and urns did not appear in
the carving at the top until the middle of the eighteenth century, and
fought hard with the grinning cherub's head until this century, when
both were supplanted by a variety of designs--a clock-face, hour-glass,
etc. Capital letters were used wholly in the inscriptions until
Revolutionary times, and even after were mixed with Roman text with so
little regard for any printer's law that, at a little distance, many a
New England tombstone of the latter part of the past century seems to be
carven in hieroglyphics.

Special families in New England seem to have appropriated special verses
as epitaphs, evidently because of the rhyme with the surname. Thus the
Jones family were properly proud of this family rhyme:

"Beneath this Ston's
Int'r'd the Bon's
Ah Frail Remains
Of Lieut Noah Jones"--

or Mary Jones or William Jones, as the case might be.

The Noyes family delighted in these lines:

"You children of the name of Noyes
Make Jesus Christ yo'r only choyse."

The Tutes and Shutes and Roots began their epitaphs thus:

"Here lies cut down like unripe fruit
The wife of Deacon Amos Shute."

Gershom Root was "cut down like unripe fruit" at the fully mellowed age
of seventy-three.

A curiously incomprehensible epitaph is this, which always strikes me
afresh, upon each perusal, as a sort of mortuary conundrum:

"O! Happy Probationer!
Accepted without being Exercised."

Sometimes an old epitaph will be found of such impressive though simple
language that it clings long in the memory. Such is this verse of gentle
quaintness over the grave of a tender Puritan blossom, the child of an
early settler:

"Submit Submitted to her heavenly Kinge
Being a flower of that Aeternal Spring
Neare 3 years old shee dyed in Heaven to waite
The Yeare was sixteen hundred 48."

Another of unusual beauty and sentiment is this:

"I came in the morning--it was Spring
A