‘There wasn’t a finer girl in Great Yafford when me and she was married,’ he said dolefully, after a brief eulogium of his faithful Moggie’s domestic virtues. Mrs. Piper’s monument was to be the glory of the village churchyard. Mr. Dulcimer was too indulgent and easy to insist upon a rigid æstheticism in the memorials which the living erected in honour of the dead. There was a good deal of bad taste in God’s Acre at Little Yafford, but Mr. Piper was destined to put the cap on the edifice by the gaudiest and most expensive mausoleum that ever the chief stonemason of Great Yafford had devised or executed. It was to be a sarcophagus of the jewel casket shape, with four twisted columns, like candlesticks, at the corners, and a tall urn surmounting the lid. Each of the columns was of a different coloured marble, the urn was dark red serpentine, with a malachite serpent coiled round it. The urn was supposed to contain Mrs. Piper’s dust, the serpent indicated that physicians and doctors’ stuff had not been wanting in the effort to keep Mrs. Piper longer upon earth. Scattered over the fluted lid of the sarcophagus were to be flowers sculptured out of coloured marble, and cemented on to the white groundwork. The sides of the sarcophagus were to be decorated with shields, richly emblazoned with the Piper arms. Mr. Piper’s arms were his own composition; his crest a ladder; his motto, _Ex sese_. Altogether the monument was to be a wonderful thing, and Mr. Piper felt a pride in contemplating the sketches which the mason had caused to be made, and in picturing to himself the effect of the whole when this great work of art should be finished. The Piper children, in black frocks, and in a state of semi-orphanage, were a little more troublesome than they had been in coloured frocks, and with an invalid mamma as a court of appeal. They brought the ghost of their lost parent into every argument. ‘I’m sure ma wouldn’t have wished me to learn three verbs in one morning,’ said Elizabeth Fry. ‘I think ma would have let me off my lessons if I had a sick headache,’ remonstrated Mary Wolstencroft. ‘I shall do my duty to you whether you like it or no,’ said Bella, resolutely. ‘Ah, you’d better take care!’ cried Brougham. ‘Ma’s in heaven, where she can see everything you’re up to, and won’t she make it disagreeable for you when you get there! If you ever do,’ added the boy, in a doubtful tone; ‘but I don’t think you stand much chance if you go on making our lives a misery with Latin grammar.’