could have felt for this dream of her girlhood, there had still been
an imaginative faith to the ocean-buried, so that an ordinary
character had thus been elevated and refined. Her sighs had been the
breath of Heaven to her soul. The good lady earnestly desired that
the proposed monument should be ornamented with a carved border of
marine plants, intertwined with twisted sea-shells, such as were
probably waving over her lover's skeleton, or strewn around it, in the
far depths of the Pacific. But Mr. Wigglesworth's chisel being
inadequate to the task, she was forced to content herself with a rose,
hanging its head from a broken stem. After her departure, I remarked
that the symbol was none of the most apt.

"And yet," said my friend the sculptor, embodying in this image the
thoughts that had been passing through my own mind, "that broken rose
has shed its sweet smell through forty years of the good woman's
life."

It was seldom that I could find such pleasant food for contemplation
as in the above instance. None off the applicants, I think, affected
me more disagreeably than an old man who came, with his fourth wife
hanging on his arm, to bespeak gravestones for the three former
occupants of his marriage-bed. I watched with some anxiety to see
whether his remembrance of either were more affectionate than of the
other two, but could discover no symptom of the kind. The three
monuments were all to be of the same material and form, and each
decorated, in bas-relief, with two weeping-willows, one of these
sympathetic trees bending over its fellow, which was to be broken in
the midst and rest upon a sepulchral urn. This, indeed, was Mr.
Wigglesworth's standing emblem of conjugal bereavement. I shuddered
at the gray polygamist, who had so utterly lost the holy sense of