bosom, yet life, and perchance its natural yearnings, may still be
warm within her, and inspire her with new hopes of happiness. Then
would she mark out the grave, the scent of which would be perceptible
on the pillow of the second bridal? No--but rather level its green
mound with the surrounding earth, as if, when she dug up again her
buried heart, the spot had ceased to be a grave. Yet, in spite of
these sentimentalities, I was prodigiously amused by an incident, of
which I had not the good fortune to be a witness, but which Mr.
Wigglesworth related with considerable humor. A gentlewoman of the
town, receiving news of her husband's loss at sea, had bespoken a
handsome slab of marble, and came daily to watch the progress of my
friend's chisel. One afternoon, when the good lady and the sculptor
were in the very midst of the epitaph, which the departed spirit might
have been greatly comforted to read, who should walk into the workshop
but the deceased himself, in substance as well as spirit! He had been
picked up at sea, and stood in no present need of tombstone or
epitaph.

"And how," inquired I, "did his wife bear the shock of joyful
surprise?"

"Why," said the old man, deepening the grin of a death's-head, on
which his chisel was just then employed, "I really felt for the poor
woman; it was one of my best pieces of marble,--and to be thrown away
on a living man!"

A comely woman, with a pretty rosebud of a daughter, came to select a
gravestone for a twin-daughter, who had died a month before. I was
impressed with the different nature of their feelings for the dead;
the mother was calm and wofully resigned, fully conscious of her loss,