cross, bearing on its centre a little white plaque, on which the
name is graven in delicate and tasteful lettering. So pretty these
little tombs are, that you might almost believe yourself in a toy
cemetery. Here and there, again, are miniature marble chapels built
over the dead,--containing white Madonnas and Christs and little
angels,--while flowering creepers climb and twine about the
pillars. Death seems so luminous here that one thinks of it
unconciously as a soft rising from this soft green earth,--like a
vapor invisible,--to melt into the prodigious day. Everything is
bright and neat and beautiful; the air is sleepy with jasmine
scent and odor of white lilies; and the palm--emblem of
immortality--lifts its head a hundred feet into the blue light.
There are rows of these majestic and symbolic trees;--two
enormous ones guard the entrance;--the others rise from among the
tombs,--white-stemmed, out-spreading their huge parasols of
verdure higher than the cathedral towers.

[Illustration: IN THE CIMETÈRE DU MOUILLAGE, ST. PIERRE.]

Behind all this, the dumb green life of the morne seems striving
to descend, to invade the rest of the dead. It thrusts green
hands over the wall,--pushes strong roots underneath;--it attacks
every joint of the stone-work, patiently, imperceptibly, yet
almost irresistibly.

... Some day there may be a great change in the little city of
St. Pierre;--there may be less money and less zeal and less
remembrance of the lost. Then from the morne, over the bulwark,
the green host will move down unopposed;--creepers will prepare
the way, dislocating the pretty tombs, pulling away the checkered