happy past; and as precious memories crowded mournfully up, she sat
upon the steps of the dreary homestead, with her arms around his
neck, and wept bitterly. After an hour she left the house, and,
followed by the dog, crossed the woods in the direction of the
neighborhood graveyard. In order to reach it she was forced to pass
by the spring and the green hillock where Mr. and Mrs. Dent slept
side by side, but no nervous terror seized her now as formerly; the
great present horror swallowed up all others, and, though she
trembled from physical debility, she dragged herself on till the
rude, rough paling of the burying-ground stood before her. Oh,
dreary desolation; thy name is country graveyard! Here no polished
sculptured stela pointed to the Eternal Rest beyond; no classic
marbles told, in gilded characters, the virtues of the dead; no
flowery-fringed gravel-walks wound from murmuring waterfalls and
rippling fountains to crystal lakes, where trailing willows threw
their flickering shadows over silver-dusted lilies; no spicy perfume
of purple heliotrope and starry jasmine burdened the silent air;
none of the solemn beauties and soothing charms of Greenwood or
Mount Auburn wooed the mourner from her weight of woe. Decaying
head-boards, green with the lichen-fingered touch of time, leaned
over neglected mounds, where last year's weeds shivered in the
sighing breeze, and autumn winds and winter rains had drifted a
brown shroud of shriveled leaves; while here and there meek-eyed
sheep lay sunning themselves upon the trampled graves, and the slow-
measured sound of a bell dinged now and then as cattle browsed on
the scanty herbage in this most neglected of God's Acres. Could
Charles Lamb have turned from the pompous epitaphs and high-flown
panegyrics of that English cemetery, to the rudely-lettered boards
which here briefly told the names and ages of the sleepers in these
narrow beds, he had never asked the question which now stands as a