At our next meeting I found him chiselling an open book upon a marble
headstone, and concluded that it was meant to express the erudition of
some black-letter clergyman of the Cotton Mather school. It turned
out, however, to be emblematical of the scriptural knowledge of an old
woman who had never read anything but her Bible; and the monument was
a tribute to her piety and good works, from the Orthodox church, of
which she had been a member. In strange contrast with this Christian
woman's memorial, was that of an infidel, whose gravestone, by his own
direction, bore an avowal of his belief that the spirt within him
would be extinguished like a flame, and that the nothingness whence he
sprang would receive him again. Mr. Wigglesworth consulted me as to
the propriety of enabling a dead man's dust to utter this dreadful
creed.

"If I thought," said he, "that a single mortal would read the
inscription without a shudder, my chisel should never cut a letter of
it. But when the grave speaks such falsehoods, the soul of man will
know the truth by its own horror."

"So it will," said I, struck by the idea; "the poor infidel may strive
to preach blasphemies from his grave; but it will be only another
method of impressing the soul with a consciousness of immortality."

There was an old man by the name of Norton, noted throughout the
island for his great wealth, which he had accumulated by the exercise
of strong and shrewd faculties, combined with a most penurious
disposition. This wretched miser, conscious that he had not a friend
to be mindful of him in his grave, had himself taken the needful
precautions for posthumous remembrance, by bespeaking an immense slab
of white marble, with a long epitaph in raised letters, the whole to