Catharine Maria Sedgwick - "Our Burial Place"

Our Burial Place
From the earliest records of the history of man we have evidences of the respect of the living for the dead in the sacredness of the burial-place. Have not our sympathies leaped the gulf of time when we have read Abraham's appeal to the sons of Heth? "I am a stranger and a sojourner with you; give me possession of a burying place;" and the answer of the generous Hittite (when Abraham offers for the care of Machpelah an equivalent in money), indicating that a repository of the dead was not to be trafficked for: "Nay, my lord, hear me; the field I give thee, and the cave that is therein I give it thee. The land is worth four hundred sheckels of silver; what is that betwixt thee and me? Bury therefore, thy dead." The natives of our own land linger with filial fondness at the graves of their fathers. The most touching passages in their eloquent remonstrances against their forced removals are those that allude to their being driven far away from their burial places. Different nations have had different modes of disposing of their dead, but whatever mode keeps their ashes near to us must preserve bright and obvoius the links that bind us to the past, and suggest to us the future. I have sometimes regretted that the manner in which the Romans preserve their dead was not in use among us, and have fancied an apartment in our dwellings where the ashes of our friends, saved from the corrupting processes of the grave, should be cherished in monumental urns. I have imagined what, in this domestic cemetery, would be the effect on our spirits of the solemn hour of twilight, of prayer, of midnight meditation, of sacred music, of any of those holy influences that seem to raise our spirits of the departed to mingle with ours here. I have fancied the pleasure of pursuing our daily employments with these hallowed memorials before us--of sewing, reading, and writing in their presence, as if they were still among us. I have calculated the power of appeals to the living in the presence of their dead-to the impatient under the load of life--to the sordid-to those eaten up with the cares of the world-to the flippant and the vicious. But this is idle. The customs of every age and country spring from its actual condition; and in our country, most especially, where nothing is stationary upon the surface, the dead should rest beneath it. What would become of our domestic cemetery in dwellings rarely tenanted by the same family for two successive generations? What would become of the ashes of the fathers who have died in Massachusetts, when their children move to the Valley of the Mississippi, and their grandchildren, perchance, to the Oregon? But, we have our burial-places where generation after generation is laid down, which we are sure will be guarded by the living, for the parent, the child, the borther of yesterday are there. Most persons have a favourite burial-place. Some prefer to be enclosed in a tomb; others would rest in a vault, beneath the consecrating walls of the church where they have worshipped, "Where, through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, The pealing anthem swells the note of praise." We have heard of a lady (she must be of the Broadway genus) who prayed to be interred in Trinity churchyard, "cost what it might, for it would be lively there, and it would be so lonesome out in the country!" I cannot sympathize with the good lady. The city seems to me the place for the living, not for the dead; for action, bustle, pursuit, not for repose and high meditation on that "something that cometh after." Neither do I fancy the vault of the tomb: not that I object to the clannishness they express-for the family on earth may be a family in heaven-but I do not like the spirit of aristocracy and exclusiveness they sometimes indicate, and which, with "all our legislating and talking about it, not only clings to all the forms of social life, but passes the threshold of the dead. "God made the country," and there, on its open bosom, should be the hallowed place of final rest; there, where the spirit of God is visible in all the exquisite forms and ministries of nature-where His voice is heard from forest and grove. There, in the country burial-place, would I lie, amid my friends of all conditions, where the sod over me was freshened by the same summer showers that pattered on the roof I had loved in life-where the morning sun, as he comes over in my native hills, shining into the windows of the homes I love, shines also upon my grave, and the twilight that calls the merry boys to our village-greens sends its dewy sweetness over my resting-place. My thoughts were turned to this subject yesterday by a walk at noonday to an eminence that rises over the village of L_______, and is surmounted (as the highest pinnacles of most old villages in New-England are) by a church. A lovely scene lies outstretched beneath this hill in L_______: the clear, bright, little village beneath it, and far away "To where the sky Stoops and shuts in the exploring eye," a glorious ampitheatre of hills-some sloped and rounded by nature for the hand of the husbandman, and the steep sides of others a dense mass of wood to their crested summits; and, deep set in the valleys between these hills, villages unseen, but known to the familiar eye by smokes arising from many a dwelling, and amid this verdant framework, a little lake, whose reflections have suggested its descriptive name, the Mountain Mirror. The wide-spread landscape is dotted with orchards and every insignia of country contentment. The sky yesterday was overcast with light vapory clouds; here and there a slant sunbeam shone down upon some little nook, like a sidelong glance of love, or a stolen smile on a favourite. The air was soft and mellow as it is on our pleasantest September days. After gazing on the distant hills until my eyes ached, I looked down upon the earnest groups that clustered in our village street, attracted there by the interest of a capital trial, and I turned from them to the cemetery at the side of the church, and for the first time it seemed to me invested with the interesting associations of a country burial-place. I have often looked on this place of interment with a sort of shuddering. It is on the very summit of a wet, bleak, gusty hill, where the very trees are piteously bent by the north winds. It seemed to me the teeth of the poor mortal fabrics must chatter, and their bones rattle as the winter blasts swept over them. I like not a burial-place on a hill: it is unsheltered, and looks obtrusive, and marvellously suited to such glorifying inscriptions as the following, which is in this same churchryard of L_______: "Reader! expect the day which shall reveal to an assembled universe the virtue and piety of Deacon J______ W_______ !" But there is a burial-place towards which my heart yearneth, and its yellow sands seem to me as they did to a fellow of my acquaintance, who, being transported to a new soil, and seeing there a coffin let into a wet grave, and thrust down amid intersecting roots, cried out, "Oh, take me home, and bury me in the nice warm sand at S_______!" In the valley enclosed by mountains and overshadowed by a green hill that rises like a protecting wall above it, how many friends (friends dear as life) and familiar acquaintances are laid! In the centre of this hallowed ground there used to stand two tall old pines. Every silver whisper of their stems spoke to the soul.. They have been cut down! Peace to him, for he was a harmless man, who did this sacrilege, because, forsooth, his view of a flaming red church was obstructed by there two mournful sentinels. It was "most foul murder-murder and treason." * Every little mound I tread upon in this burial-place recalls some social or individual history. From my childhood I knew those that sleep beneath it-the rich and the poor, the master and servant, the good and bad. Here lie two enemies side by side-their coffins touching-who could not eat at the same table, breathe beneath the same roof, or worship God in the same church. Where are now their strifes, their unbridled passions, their unrelenting hate, their everlasting feuds! "Underneath this stone lies J_____ M_______, Justice of peace at all times and places" a little man, almost as quiet in life as in death, who never made a broil, and notwithstanding the claims of universal magistracy set forth in his epitah, never, I believe, settled one. Here, side by side, in three successive summers, were interred three sisters. How excellent, how lovely and beloved they were in life, how desolate they left their widowed mother, how each was mourned by the surviver, their epitahs but half tell; for I well remember when, with general sorrow, the village procession followed one after another to the insatiable grave. Grief is still here. 1. In justice to the good man (Doctor P_______) here alluded to, I am bound to publish his protest against the motive ascribed to him, which I quoted from common fame. There were objections made to those sacred old trees on the ground I have specified, but Doctor P_______ removed them lest the wind should sweep them down on the surrounding monuments. We must pardon this over-carefulness in consideration of the innumerable good .offices the doctor has done in our neighbourhoods. He yet survives, in his ninety-fourth year, with a memory so stored and accurate that he still corrects traditionary errors and settles uncertain landmarks. Here lies one, brave and joyous in life, and most courageous in death, who came home, wasted and suffering, from foreign countries, to breathe his last sigh in his native land. The last glimmerings of the summer twilight were fading from the valley when his brothers brought his body into the burial-place of his fathers. For long and anxious months, his parents had prayed and wept for him, but when they laid hom among his departed kindred, the voice of praise and thankfulness, and not the cries of grief, was heard. His gentle mother fills the next grave! We buried our good old Colonel ________ here. He was of the old regime, of those times when the gentleman did in his secret soul believe that he was made of better clay than the "fellow." Colonel _______ was the last relic among us of anti-revolutionary and anti-republican days; the last surviving associate and boon companion of those three notable gentlemen of Conneticut River, real demigods in their day, but styled by their profane descendants "River Gods." The colonel was loyal to the King of England, and a Tory to his last day, because he believed that truth and loyalty were one, and that orders were Heaven's first law; but as the wave of the multitude rose and covered one elevation after another, he submitted, with Christian meekness, believing the people were made sovereign by the judgment of Heaven upon the rebellion of man. Amid the familiarity and rusticity of our village life, the colonel maintained his punctilious politeness; and I remember, the ruling passion strong in death, his last words-they were addressed to a lady weeping over him: "Pray, madam," he said, "be seated." He was a good man and true, and there, where rank is graduated by merit, where there be angels and archangels, he may find himself exhalted far above some to whom he would have given precedence here. Near the colonel lies a fair specimen of the old regime of the softer sex: one who never dreamed of those degenerate days when women explain the Mechaniques Celestes of La place, and rectify the political economy of nations, but who, according to the elder orthodoxy, spent her threescore years and ten in making pastry, concocting sirups and sweetmeats, and exploring the culinary arcana. Her ruling passion, too, was dominant in extremities. I remember that, the nigh her husband died, she took one of the attendants into her pantry to descant on the size, colours, and quality of her pickles. When they came out he was gone! A little farther on-for here, shame to us! the coloured people are laid apart-we buried "old Joe." He would, if he had dared, have protested against his location, for Joe was an "extra exclusive" in life, and on his deathbed gave his apparel to my friend _______, whom he considered the first gentleman in the county, saying, "Pray accept my clothes, sir, for I can't bare the thoughts any nigger should wear them!" And here is J.'s grave-J_______, the fiddler. How often have young hearts, as well as feet, danced at the sound of J_____'s fiddle. He was the Apollo of the country round. We thought his violin might have realized the poetic imagination, "created a soul under the ribs of death." Poor J_______! that fiddle was most dear to him. He loved it first, last, and best, and when he was actually dying, he begged his attendant to hold his hand, that he might once more move the bow over the strings. Like the swan, he expired in his own music. And here lies one whose worth is truly recorded on this stone by one who set it here to express the honour and gratitude they owed her. No praise could exceed her due who filled a long life with usefulness, and met her death with dignity and submission, saying, as she bowed her head, "This is the last stroke, and the best!"
"ELIZABETH FREEMAN, Known by the name of Mumbet Died Dec. 28, 1809. Her Supposed Age was 85 years. She was born a slave, and remained a salve for nearly thirty years: she could neither read nor write; yet in her own sphere she had no superior nor equal: she never wasted time nor property: she never violated a trust, nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial she was the most efficient helper and the tenderest friend. Good Mother, Farewell!"
Here lies one, albeit our village doctor, who breathed around him an atmosphere of health and cheerfulness. He withheld his drugs, and gave us smiles and pleasant words, which, as Scripture tells us, are "health to the bones;" and so we lived to lay him here, whom neither the skill of his brethren nor the love of our stricken hearts could save. And this is the grave of our good pastor, who survived a generation of his flock, and, after preaching to them and to their children's children for the space of fifty-nine years (as his epitah tells us), was laid to rest among them. He was a theologian of the old New-England school. His creed was as unchangeable as the fashion of his dress, and that never altered a thread. To his dying day he wore his three-cornered hat, his knee-buckes and shoe-buckes, and ribbed stockings snugly fitting his well-preserved leg, which disdained the levelling pantaloon. We have hinted at the inflexibility of his faith-but there ended his sterness. He might have counted on his fingers those of his flock who, according to his theories, could hope to escape the "wrath to come," but never did a scapegrace among them died but he found some loophole for charity. His faith was a portion of his inheritance; his charity was breathed into his soul by the spirit of God. Here he sleeps in the midst of his people: of the children whom he dedicated, the young whom he joined in holy bonds, the wandering whom he reclaimed, the faithful whom he encouraged, the old with whom he took counsel. May they all appear among the redeemed when the grave shall give back its dead! Note.-Since this sketch was written, many beautiful cemeteries have been laid out in different parts of the country. Mount Auburn is of an older date. Greenwood Cemetery, for New-York, is not only remarkable for the appropriateness of its position, the beauty of its grounds, and the sublimity of its views, but is on a scale of magnificence proportioned to the prospective greatness of the city. Many of our inland towns have selected lovely spots, adorned them, and consecrated them to this holy use. We wish that our smaller villages would imitate them in so much as to repair their neglected burial-places, extend the enclosures where more room is wanted, reset the fallen monuments, rebuild the fences, and plant around them screens of evergreen and trees for walks, where their children may hereafter resort to indulge in affectionate memories and holy contemplations.

Our Burial Place

From the earliest records of the history of man we have evidences of the respect of the living for the dead in the sacredness of the burial-place. Have not our sympathies leaped the gulf of time when we have read Abraham's appeal to the sons of Heth? "I am a stranger and a sojourner with you; give me possession of a burying place;" and the answer of the generous Hittite (when Abraham offers for the care of Machpelah an equivalent in money), indicating that a repository of the dead was not to be trafficked for: "Nay, my lord, hear me; the field I give thee, and the cave that is therein I give it thee. The land is worth four hundred sheckels of silver; what is that betwixt thee and me? Bury therefore, thy dead."

The natives of our own land linger with filial fondness at the graves of their fathers. The most touching passages in their eloquent remonstrances against their forced removals are those that allude to their being driven far away from their burial places.

Different nations have had different modes of disposing of their dead, but whatever mode keeps their ashes near to us must preserve bright and obvoius the links that bind us to the past, and suggest to us the future. I have sometimes regretted that the manner in which the Romans preserve their dead was not in use among us, and have fancied an apartment in our dwellings where the ashes of our friends, saved from the corrupting processes of the grave, should be cherished in monumental urns. I have imagined what, in this domestic cemetery, would be the effect on our spirits of the solemn hour of twilight, of prayer, of midnight meditation, of sacred music, of any of those holy influences that seem to raise our spirits of the departed to mingle with ours here. I have fancied the pleasure of pursuing our daily employments with these hallowed memorials before us--of sewing, reading, and writing in their presence, as if they were still among us. I have calculated the power of appeals to the living in the presence of their dead-to the impatient under the load of life--to the sordid-to those eaten up with the cares of the world-to the flippant and the vicious.

But this is idle. The customs of every age and country spring from its actual condition; and in our country, most especially, where nothing is stationary upon the surface, the dead should rest beneath it. What would become of our domestic cemetery in dwellings rarely tenanted by the same family for two successive generations? What would become of the ashes of the fathers who have died in Massachusetts, when their children move to the Valley of the Mississippi, and their grandchildren, perchance, to the Oregon?

But, we have our burial-places where generation after generation is laid down, which we are sure will be guarded by the living, for the parent, the child, the borther of yesterday are there.

Most persons have a favourite burial-place. Some prefer to be enclosed in a tomb; others would rest in a vault, beneath the consecrating walls of the church where they have worshipped,
"Where, through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, The pealing anthem swells the note of praise."
We have heard of a lady (she must be of the Broadway genus) who prayed to be interred in Trinity churchyard, "cost what it might, for it would be lively there, and it would be so lonesome out in the country!"

I cannot sympathize with the good lady. The city seems to me the place for the living, not for the dead; for action, bustle, pursuit, not for repose and high meditation on that "something that cometh after." Neither do I fancy the vault of the tomb: not that I object to the clannishness they express-for the family on earth may be a family in heaven-but I do not like the spirit of aristocracy and exclusiveness they sometimes indicate, and which, with "all our legislating and talking about it, not only clings to all the forms of social life, but passes the threshold of the dead.

"God made the country," and there, on its open bosom, should be the hallowed place of final rest; there, where the spirit of God is visible in all the exquisite forms and ministries of nature-where His voice is heard from forest and grove. There, in the country burial-place, would I lie, amid my friends of all conditions, where the sod over me was freshened by the same summer showers that pattered on the roof I had loved in life-where the morning sun, as he comes over in my native hills, shining into the windows of the homes I love, shines also upon my grave, and the twilight that calls the merry boys to our village-greens sends its dewy sweetness over my resting-place.

My thoughts were turned to this subject yesterday by a walk at noonday to an eminence that rises over the village of L_______, and is surmounted (as the highest pinnacles of most old villages in New-England are) by a church. A lovely scene lies outstretched beneath this hill in L_______: the clear, bright, little village beneath it, and far away

"To where the sky Stoops and shuts in the exploring eye,"

a glorious ampitheatre of hills-some sloped and rounded by nature for the hand of the husbandman, and the steep sides of others a dense mass of wood to their crested summits; and, deep set in the valleys between these hills, villages unseen, but known to the familiar eye by smokes arising from many a dwelling, and amid this verdant framework, a little lake, whose reflections have suggested its descriptive name, the Mountain Mirror. The wide-spread landscape is dotted with orchards and every insignia of country contentment. The sky yesterday was overcast with light vapory clouds; here and there a slant sunbeam shone down upon some little nook, like a sidelong glance of love, or a stolen smile on a favourite. The air was soft and mellow as it is on our pleasantest September days. After gazing on the distant hills until my eyes ached, I looked down upon the earnest groups that clustered in our village street, attracted there by the interest of a capital trial, and I turned from them to the cemetery at the side of the church, and for the first time it seemed to me invested with the interesting associations of a country burial-place. I have often looked on this place of interment with a sort of shuddering. It is on the very summit of a wet, bleak, gusty hill, where the very trees are piteously bent by the north winds. It seemed to me the teeth of the poor mortal fabrics must chatter, and their bones rattle as the winter blasts swept over them. I like not a burial-place on a hill: it is unsheltered, and looks obtrusive, and marvellously suited to such glorifying inscriptions as the following, which is in this same churchryard of L_______:

"Reader! expect the day which shall reveal to an assembled universe the virtue and piety of Deacon J______ W_______ !"

But there is a burial-place towards which my heart yearneth, and its yellow sands seem to me as they did to a fellow of my acquaintance, who, being transported to a new soil, and seeing there a coffin let into a wet grave, and thrust down amid intersecting roots, cried out, "Oh, take me home, and bury me in the nice warm sand at S_______!" In the valley enclosed by mountains and overshadowed by a green hill that rises like a protecting wall above it, how many friends (friends dear as life) and familiar acquaintances are laid! In the centre of this hallowed ground there used to stand two tall old pines. Every silver whisper of their stems spoke to the soul.. They have been cut down! Peace to him, for he was a harmless man, who did this sacrilege, because, forsooth, his view of a flaming red church was obstructed by there two mournful sentinels. It was "most foul murder-murder and treason." *

Every little mound I tread upon in this burial-place recalls some social or individual history. From my childhood I knew those that sleep beneath it-the rich and the poor, the master and servant, the good and bad. Here lie two enemies side by side-their coffins touching-who could not eat at the same table, breathe beneath the same roof, or worship God in the same church. Where are now their strifes, their unbridled passions, their unrelenting hate, their everlasting feuds!

"Underneath this stone lies J_____ M_______, Justice of peace at all times and places" a little man, almost as quiet in life as in death, who never made a broil, and notwithstanding the claims of universal magistracy set forth in his epitah, never, I believe, settled one.

Here, side by side, in three successive summers, were interred three sisters. How excellent, how lovely and beloved they were in life, how desolate they left their widowed mother, how each was mourned by the surviver, their epitahs but half tell; for I well remember when, with general sorrow, the village procession followed one after another to the insatiable grave. Grief is still here.

1. In justice to the good man (Doctor P_______) here alluded to, I am bound to publish his protest against the motive ascribed to him, which I quoted from common fame. There were objections made to those sacred old trees on the ground I have specified, but Doctor P_______ removed them lest the wind should sweep them down on the surrounding monuments. We must pardon this over-carefulness in consideration of the innumerable good .offices the doctor has done in our neighbourhoods. He yet survives, in his ninety-fourth year, with a memory so stored and accurate that he still corrects traditionary errors and settles uncertain landmarks.

Here lies one, brave and joyous in life, and most courageous in death, who came
home, wasted and suffering, from foreign countries, to breathe his last sigh in his native land. The last glimmerings of the summer twilight were fading from the valley when his brothers brought his body into the burial-place of his fathers. For long and anxious months, his parents had prayed and wept for him, but when they laid hom among his departed kindred, the voice of praise and thankfulness, and not the cries of grief, was heard. His gentle mother fills the next grave!

We buried our good old Colonel ________ here. He was of the old regime, of those times when the gentleman did in his secret soul believe that he was made of better clay than the "fellow." Colonel _______ was the last relic among us of anti-revolutionary and anti-republican days; the last surviving associate and boon companion of those three notable gentlemen of Conneticut River, real demigods in their day, but styled by their profane descendants "River Gods." The colonel was loyal to the King of England, and a Tory to his last day, because he believed that truth and loyalty were one, and that orders were Heaven's first law; but as the wave of the multitude rose and covered one elevation after another, he submitted, with Christian meekness, believing the people were made sovereign by the judgment of Heaven upon the rebellion of man. Amid the familiarity and rusticity of our village life, the colonel maintained his punctilious politeness; and I remember, the ruling passion strong in death, his last words-they were addressed to a lady weeping over him: "Pray, madam," he said, "be seated." He was a good man and true, and there, where rank is graduated by merit, where there be angels and archangels, he may find himself exhalted far above some to whom he would have given precedence here.

Near the colonel lies a fair specimen of the old regime of the softer sex: one who never dreamed of those degenerate days when women explain the Mechaniques Celestes of La place, and rectify the political economy of nations, but who, according to the elder orthodoxy, spent her threescore years and ten in making pastry, concocting sirups and sweetmeats, and exploring the culinary arcana. Her ruling passion, too, was dominant in extremities. I remember that, the nigh her husband died, she took one of the attendants into her pantry to descant on the size, colours, and quality of her pickles. When they came out he was gone!

A little farther on-for here, shame to us! the coloured people are laid apart-we buried "old Joe." He would, if he had dared, have protested against his location, for Joe was an "extra exclusive" in life, and on his deathbed gave his apparel to my friend _______, whom he considered the first gentleman in the county, saying, "Pray accept my clothes, sir, for I can't bare the thoughts any nigger should wear them!"
And here is J.'s grave-J_______, the fiddler. How often have young hearts, as well as feet, danced at the sound of J_____'s fiddle. He was the Apollo of the country round. We thought his violin might have realized the poetic imagination, "created a soul under the ribs of death." Poor J_______! that fiddle was most dear to him. He loved it first, last, and best, and when he was actually dying, he begged his attendant to hold his hand, that he might once more move the bow over the strings. Like the swan, he expired in his own music.

And here lies one whose worth is truly recorded on this stone by one who set it here to express the honour and gratitude they owed her. No praise could exceed her due who filled a long life with usefulness, and met her death with dignity and submission, saying, as she bowed her head, "This is the last stroke, and the best!"

"ELIZABETH FREEMAN,
Known by the name of Mumbet

Died Dec. 28, 1809.

Her Supposed Age was 85 years.

She was born a slave, and remained a salve for nearly thirty years: she could neither read nor write;
yet in her own sphere she had no superior nor equal: she never wasted time nor property: she never violated a trust, nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial she was the most efficient helper and the tenderest friend.

Good Mother, Farewell!"

Here lies one, albeit our village doctor, who breathed around him an atmosphere of health and cheerfulness. He withheld his drugs, and gave us smiles and pleasant words, which, as Scripture tells us, are "health to the bones;" and so we lived to lay him here, whom neither the skill of his brethren nor the love of our stricken hearts could save.

And this is the grave of our good pastor, who survived a generation of his flock, and, after preaching to them and to their children's children for the space of fifty-nine years (as his epitah tells us), was laid to rest among them. He was a theologian of the old New-England school. His creed was as unchangeable as the fashion of his dress, and that never altered a thread. To his dying day he wore his three-cornered hat, his knee-buckes and shoe-buckes, and ribbed stockings snugly fitting his well-preserved leg, which disdained the levelling pantaloon. We have hinted at the inflexibility of his faith-but there ended his sterness. He might have counted on his fingers those of his flock who, according to his theories, could hope to escape the "wrath to come," but never did a scapegrace among them died but he found some loophole for charity. His faith was a portion of his inheritance; his charity was breathed into his soul by the spirit of God. Here he sleeps in the midst of his people: of the children whom he dedicated, the young whom he joined in holy bonds, the wandering whom he reclaimed, the faithful whom he encouraged, the old with whom he took counsel. May they all appear among the redeemed when the grave shall give back its dead!

Note.-Since this sketch was written, many beautiful cemeteries have been laid out in different parts of the country. Mount Auburn is of an older date. Greenwood Cemetery, for New-York, is not only remarkable for the appropriateness of its position, the beauty of its grounds, and the sublimity of its views, but is on a scale of magnificence proportioned to the prospective greatness of the city. Many of our inland towns have selected lovely spots, adorned them, and consecrated them to this holy use. We wish that our smaller villages would imitate them in so much as to repair their neglected burial-places, extend the enclosures where more room is wanted, reset the fallen monuments, rebuild the fences, and plant around them screens of evergreen and trees for walks, where their children may hereafter resort to indulge in affectionate memories and holy contemplations.