individuality in wedlock, that methought he was fain to reckon upon
his fingers how many women, who had once slept by his side, were now
sleeping in their graves. There was even--if I wrong him it is no
great matter--a glance sidelong at his living spouse, as if he were
inclined to drive a thriftier bargain by bespeaking four gravestones
in a lot. I was better pleased with a rough old whaling captain, who
gave directions for a broad marble slab, divided into two
compartments, one of which was to contain an epitaph on his deceased
wife, and the other to be left vacant, till death should engrave his
own name there. As is frequently the case among the whalers of
Martha's Vineyard, so much of this stormbeaten widower's life had been
tossed away on distant seas, that out of twenty years of matrimony he
had spent scarce three, and those at scattered intervals, beneath his
own roof. Thus the wife of his youth, though she died in his and her
declining age, retained the bridal dewdrops fresh around her memory.

My observations gave me the idea, and Mr. Wigglesworth confirmed it,
that husbands were more faithful in setting up memorials to their dead
wives than widows to their dead husbands. I was not ill-natured
enough to fancy that women, less than men, feel so sure of their own
constancy as to be willing to give a pledge of it in marble. It is
more probably the fact, that while men are able to reflect upon their
lost companions as remembrances apart from themselves, women, on the
other hand, are conscious that a portion of their being has gone with
the departed whithersoever he has gone. Soul clings to soul; the
living dust has a sympathy with the dust of the grave; and, by the
very strength of that sympathy, the wife of the dead shrinks the more
sensitively from reminding the world of its existence. The link is
already strong enough; it needs no visible symbol. And, though a
shadow walks ever by her side, and the touch of a chill hand is on her