my repertory of associations with brick-kilns is exhausted, but, oddly
enough, I no longer care to encounter it.

It is perhaps in a pious recognition of our mortality that Dublin is built
around the Irish grave-yard. Most of its windows look out upon the
sepulchral monuments and the pretty constant arrival of the funeral trains
with their long lines of carriages bringing to the celebration of the sad
ultimate rites those gay companies of Irish mourners. I suppose that the
spectacle of such obsequies is not at all depressing to the inhabitants of
Dublin; but that, on the contrary, it must beget in them a feeling which,
if not resignation to death, is, at least, a sort of sub-acute
cheerfulness in his presence. None but a Dubliner, however, would have
been greatly animated by a scene which I witnessed during a stroll through
this cemetery one afternoon of early spring. The fact that a marble slab
or shaft more or less sculptured, and inscribed with words more or less
helpless, is the utmost that we can give to one whom once we could caress
with every tenderness of speech and touch, and that, after all, the
memorial we raise is rather to our own grief, and is a decency, a mere
conventionality,--this is a dreadful fact on which the heart breaks itself
with such a pang, that it always seems a desolation never recognized, an
anguish never felt before. Whilst I stood revolving this thought in my
mind, and reading the Irish names upon the stones and the black head-
boards,--the latter adorned with pictures of angels, once gilt, but now
weather-worn down to the yellow paint,--a wail of intolerable pathos
filled the air: "O my darling, O my darling! O--O--O!" with sobs and
groans and sighs; and, looking about, I saw two women, one standing
upright beside another that had cast herself upon a grave, and lay
clasping it with her comfortless arms, uttering these cries. The grave was
a year old at least, but the grief seemed of yesterday or of that morning.
At times the friend that stood beside the prostrate woman stooped and