returned to its original barrenness,--in that ancient burial-ground I
noticed much variety of monumental sculpture. The elder stones, dated
a century back, or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers,
and are adorned with a multiplicity of death's-heads, cross-bones,
scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality, with
here and there a winged cherub to direct the mourner's spirit upward.
These productions of Gothic taste must have been quite beyond the
colonial skill of the day, and were probably carved in London, and
brought across the ocean to commemorate the defunct worthies of this
lonely isle. The more recent monuments are mere slabs of slate, in
the ordinary style, without any superfluous flourishes to set off the
bald inscriptions. But others--and those far the most impressive,
both to my taste and feelings--were roughly hewn from the gray rocks
of the island, evidently by the unskilled hands of surviving friends
and relatives. On some there were merely the initials of a name; some
were inscribed with misspelt prose or rhyme, in deep letters, which
the moss and wintry rain of many years had not been able to
obliterate. These, these were graves where loved ones slept! It is
an old theme of satire, the falsehood and vanity of monumental
eulogies; but when affection and sorrow grave the letters with their
own painful labor, then we may be sure that they copy from the record
on their hearts.

My acquaintance, the sculptor,--he may share that title with
Greenough, since the dauber of signs is a painter as well as Raphael,
--had found a ready market for all his blank slabs of marble, and full
occupation in lettering and ornamenting them. He was an elderly man, a
descendant of the old Puritan family of Wigglesworth, with a certain
simplicity and singleness, both of heart and mind, which, methinks, is
more rarely-found among us Yankees than in any other community of