A consort in royal dignity and poetry is a sharer of one’s lot. Mr. Joseph Merrill had no acquaintance with the swagger and pretension of courts, and he knew no poetry save his hill-side, his villagers, and the mighty songs of the Bible. He was a plain, simple, Yankee husbandman, round-shouldered from carrying heavy burdens, coarse-handed from much tilling of the earth and use of horse and cattle. While he listened to sermons in the white church down the slope, his eyes were often heavy for need of morning sleep; and many a Sunday his back and knees ached from lack of rest as he stood beside the sharer of his fortunes in prayer. Yet his simple memorial warms the human heart one hundred and thirty-eight years after his “consort” had for the last time folded her housewifely hands. “Of sa great faith and charitie, With mutuall love and amitie: That I wat an mair heavenly life, Was never betweene man and wife.” It was doubtless with Master Merrill as with the subject of an encomium of Charles Lamb’s. “Though bred a Presbyterian,” says Lamb of Joseph Paice, “and brought up a merchant, he was the finest gentleman of his time.” In May, 1767, when this sharer of humble fortune lay down to rest, the Stamp Act had been repealed but fourteen months. The eyes of the world were upon Pitt and Burke and Townshend--and Franklin whose memorable examination before the House of Commons was then circulating as a news pamphlet. The social gossip of the day--as Lady Sarah Lennox’s wit recounts--had no more recognition of the villagers than George the Fourth. But American sinews and muscles such as these hidden on the Litchfield Hills were growing in daily strength by helpful, human exercise, and their “well-lined braine” was reasoning upon the Declaratory Act that “Parliament had power to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever.” Another stone a few paces away has quite another story: “Here lies the body of Mr. Stephen Kelsey, who died April 2, 1745, in y^e 71 year of his age as you are so was we as we are you must be” The peculiarities of this inscription were doubtless the stone-cutter’s; and peradventure it was in the following way that the rhymes--already centuries old in 1745 when Stephen Kelsey died--came to be upon his headstone. The carver of the memorial was undeniably a neighbor and fellow-husbandman to the children of Mr. Stephen Kelsey. Money-earning opportunities were narrow and silver hard to come by in the pioneering of the Litchfield Hills, and only after scrupulous saving had the Kelsey family the cost of the headstone at last in hand. It was then that they met to consider an epitaph. Their neighbor bespoken to work the stone was at the meeting, and to open the way and clear his memory he scratched the date of death upon a tablet or shingle his own hand had riven.