Twice-told tales
of a treasure which she had not always possessed, and therefore had
been aware that it might be taken from her; but the daughter evidently
had no real knowledge of what Death’s doings were. Her thoughts knew,
but not her heart. It seemed to me that by the print and pressure which
the dead sister had left upon the survivor’s spirit her feelings were
almost the same as if she still stood side by side and arm in arm with
the departed, looking at the slabs of marble, and once or twice she
glanced around with a sunny smile, which, as its sister-smile had faded
for ever, soon grew confusedly overshadowed. Perchance her
consciousness was truer than her reflection; perchance her dead sister
was a closer companion than in life.
The mother and daughter talked a long while with Mr. Wigglesworth about
a suitable epitaph, and finally chose an ordinary verse of ill-matched
rhymes which had already been inscribed upon innumerable tombstones.
But when we ridicule the triteness of monumental verses, we forget that
Sorrow reads far deeper in them than we can, and finds a profound and
individual purport in what seems so vague and inexpressive unless
interpreted by her. She makes the epitaph anew, though the selfsame
words may have served for a thousand graves.
“And yet,” said I afterward to Mr. Wigglesworth, “they might have made
a better choice than this. While you were discussing the subject I was
struck by at least a dozen simple and natural expressions from the lips
of both mother and daughter. One of these would have formed an
inscription equally original and appropriate.”
“No, no!” replied the sculptor, shaking his head; “there is a good deal
of comfort to be gathered from these little old scraps of poetry, and
so I always recommend them in preference to any new-fangled ones. And
somehow they seem to stretch to suit a great grief and shrink to fit a
small one.”
It was not seldom that ludicrous images were excited by what took place
between Mr. Wigglesworth and his customers. A shrewd gentlewoman who
kept a tavern in the town was anxious to obtain two or three
gravestones for the deceased members of her family, and to pay for
these solemn commodities by taking the sculptor to board. Hereupon a
fantasy arose in my mind of good Mr. Wigglesworth sitting down to
dinner at a broad, flat tombstone carving one of his own plump little
marble cherubs, gnawing a pair of crossbones and drinking out of a
hollow death’s-head or perhaps a lachrymatory vase or sepulchral urn,
while his hostess’s dead children waited on him at the ghastly banquet.
On communicating this nonsensical picture to the old man he laughed
heartily and pronounced my humor to be of the right sort.
“I have lived at such a table all my days,” said he, “and eaten no
small quantity of slate and marble.”
“Hard fare,” rejoined I, smiling, “but you seemed to have found it
excellent of digestion, too.”
A man of fifty or thereabouts with a harsh, unpleasant countenance
ordered a stone for the grave of his bitter enemy, with whom he had
waged warfare half a lifetime, to their mutual misery and ruin. The
secret of this phenomenon was that hatred had become the sustenance and
enjoyment of the poor wretch’s soul; it had supplied the place of all
kindly affections; it had been really a bond of sympathy between
himself and the man who shared the passion; and when its object died,
the unappeasable foe was the only mourner for the dead. He expressed a
purpose of being buried side by side with his enemy.
“I doubt whether their dust will mingle,” remarked the old sculptor to
me; for often there was an earthliness in his conceptions.
“Oh yes,” replied I, who had mused long upon the incident; “and when
they rise again, these bitter foes may find themselves dear friends.
Methinks what they mistook for hatred was but love under a mask.”
A gentleman of antiquarian propensities provided a memorial for an
Indian of Chabbiquidick—one of the few of untainted blood remaining in
that region, and said to be a hereditary chieftain descended from the
sachem who welcomed Governor Mayhew to the Vineyard. Mr. Wiggles-worth
exerted his best skill to carve a broken bow and scattered sheaf of
arrows in memory of the hunters and warriors whose race was ended here,
but he likewise sculptured a cherub, to denote that the poor Indian had
shared the Christian’s hope of immortality.
“Why,” observed I, taking a perverse view of the winged boy and the bow
and arrows, “it looks more like Cupid’s tomb than an Indian chief’s.”
“You talk nonsense,” said the sculptor, with the offended pride of art.
He then added with his usual good-nature, “How can Cupid die when there
are such pretty maidens in the Vineyard?”
“Very true,” answered I; and for the rest of the day I thought of other
matters than tombstones.
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 spirit 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 be as magnificent
as Mr. Wigglesworth’s skill could make it. There was something very
characteristic in this contrivance to have his money’s worth even from
his own tombstone, which, indeed, afforded him more enjoyment in the
few months that he lived thereafter than it probably will in a whole
century, now that it is laid over his bones.
This incident reminds me of a young girl—a pale, slender, feeble
creature most unlike the other rosy and healthful damsels of the
Vineyard, amid whose brightness she was fading away. Day after day did
the poor maiden come to the sculptor’s shop and pass from one piece of
marble to another, till at last she pencilled her name upon a slender
slab which, I think, was of a more spotless white than all the rest. I
saw her no more, but soon afterward found Mr. Wigglesworth cutting her
virgin-name into the stone which she had chosen.
“She is dead, poor girl!” said he, interrupting the tune which he was
whistling, “and she chose a good piece of stuff for her headstone. Now,
which of these slabs would you like best to see your own name upon?”
“Why, to tell you the truth, my good Mr. Wigglesworth,” replied I,
after a moment’s pause, for the abruptness of the question had somewhat
startled me—“to be quite sincere with you, I care little or nothing
about a stone for my own grave, and am somewhat inclined to scepticism
as to the propriety of erecting monuments at all over the dust that
once was human. The weight of these heavy marbles, though unfelt by the
dead corpse or the enfranchised soul, presses drearily upon the spirit
of the survivor and causes him to connect the idea of death with the
dungeon-like imprisonment of the tomb, instead of with the freedom of
the skies. Every gravestone that you ever made is the visible symbol of
a mistaken system. Our thoughts should soar upward with the butterfly,
not linger with the exuviæ that confined him. In truth and reason,
neither those whom we call the living, and still less the departed,
have anything to do with the grave.”
“I never heard anything so heathenish,” said Mr. Wigglesworth,
perplexed and displeased at sentiments which controverted all his
notions and feelings and implied the utter waste, and worse, of his
whole life’s labor. “Would you forget your dead friends the moment they
are under the sod?”
“They are not under the sod,” I rejoined; “then why should I mark the
spot where there is no treasure hidden? Forget them? No; but, to
remember them aright, I would forget what they have cast off. And to
gain the truer conception of death I would forget the grave.”
But still the good old sculptor murmured, and stumbled, as it were,
over the gravestones amid which he had walked through life. Whether he
were right or wrong, I had grown the wiser from our companionship and
from my observations of nature and character as displayed by those who
came, with their old griefs or their new ones, to get them recorded
upon his slabs of marble. And yet with my gain of wisdom I had likewise
gained perplexity; for there was a strange doubt in my mind whether the
dark shadowing of this life, the sorrows and regrets, have not as much
real comfort in them—leaving religious influences out of the
question—as what we term life’s joys.
THE SHAKER BRIDAL
One day, in the sick-chamber of Father Ephraim, who had been forty
years the presiding elder over the Shaker settlement at Goshen, there
was an assemblage of several of the chief men of the sect. Individuals
had come from the rich establishment at Lebanon, from Canterbury,
Harvard and Alfred, and from all the other localities where this
strange people have fertilized the rugged hills of New England by their
systematic industry. An elder was likewise there who had made a
pilgrimage of a thousand miles from a village of the faithful in
Kentucky to visit his spiritual kindred the children of the sainted
Mother Ann. He had partaken of the homely abundance of their tables,
had quaffed the far-famed Shaker cider, and had joined in the sacred
dance every step of which is believed to alienate the enthusiast from
earth and bear him onward to heavenly purity and bliss. His brethren of
the North had now courteously invited him to be present on an occasion
when the concurrence of every eminent member of their community was
peculiarly desirable.
The venerable Father Ephraim sat in his easy-chair, not only
hoary-headed and infirm with age, but worn down by a lingering disease
which it was evident would very soon transfer his patriarchal staff to
other hands. At his footstool stood a man and woman, both clad in the
Shaker garb.
“My brethren,” said Father Ephraim to the surrounding elders, feebly
exerting himself to utter these few words, “here are the son and
daughter to whom I would commit the trust of which Providence is about
to lighten my weary shoulders. Read their faces, I pray you, and say
whether the inward movement of the spirit hath guided my choice
aright.”
Accordingly, each elder looked at the two candidates with a most
scrutinizing gaze. The man—whose name was Adam Colburn—had a face
sunburnt with labor in the fields, yet intelligent, thoughtful and
traced with cares enough for a whole lifetime, though he had barely