'Oh, certainly!' exclaimed Miss Corke. 'This way. And after that you'll declare you've seen them all. But you might just take time to understand that you're walking over "O rare Ben Jonson!" who is standing up in his old bones down there as straight as you or I. Insisted--as you probably are not aware--on being buried that way, so as to be ready when Gabriel blows his trumpet in the morning. I won't say that he hasn't got his coat and hat on. Yes, that's Samuel--I'm glad you didn't say Ben was the lexicographer. Milton--certainly--it's kind of you to notice him. Blind, you remember. The author of several works of some reputation--in England.' 'I knew he was blind,' I said, 'and used to dictate to his daughters. We have a picture of it at home.' I made this remark very innocently, and Miss Corke looked at me with a comical smile. 'Bless it and save it!' she said, and then, with an attempt at a reproach, 'What a humbug it is!' We looked at Shakespeare, supreme among them, predicting solemn dissolution out of 'The Tempest,' and turned from him to Gay, whose final reckless word I read with as much astonishment as if I had never heard of it before. Life's a jest, and all things show it; I thought so once, and now I know it, has no significance at all read in an American school-book two thousand miles, and a hundred and fifty years from the writer of it, compared with the grim shock it gives you when you see it actually cut deep in the stone, to be a memorial always of a dead man somewhere not far away. Original 'That you should have heard of Nicholas Rowe,' said Miss Corke, 'is altogether too much to expect. Dear me! it would be considerably easier to improve your mind if it had ever been tried before. But he was poet-laureate for George the First--you understand the term?' 'I think so,' I said. 'They contract to supply the Royal Family with poetry, by the year, at a salary. We have nothing of the kind in America. You see our Presidents differ so. They might not all like poetry. And in that case it would be wasted, for there isn't a magazine in the country that would take it second-hand.' 'Besides having no poets who could do it properly, poor things!' said Miss Corke--to which I acceded without difficulty. 'Well, Mr. Rowe was a poet-laureate, though that has nothing whatever to do with it. But he had a great friend in Mr. Pope--Pope, you know him--by reputation--and when he and his daughter died, Mr. Pope and Mrs. Rowe felt so bad about it that he wrote those mournful lines, and she had'em put up. Now listen!-- To those so mourned in death, so lov'd in life, The childless parent and the widowed wife-- meaning the same lady; it was only a neat way they had of doubling up a sentiment in those days!-- With tears inscribes this monumental stone, That holds their ashes and expects her own!