evidently intentional. Nor is the grave of Goffe less curious. The stone is at first read, "M. G. 80;" but, looking closer, you discover a superfluous line cut under the M, to hint that it must not be taken for what it seems. It is in fact a W reversed, and the whole means, "W. G. 1680;" the true initials, and date of death of William Goffe. If Dixwell was not himself the engraver of these rude devices, he doubtless contrived them; and they have well accomplished their purpose, of avoiding detection in their own day, and attracting notice in ours. There was something that touched me, in spite of myself, in thus standing by these rude graves, and surveying the last relicts of men born far away in happy English homes, who once made a figure among the great men, and were numbered with the lawful senators of a free and prosperous state! I own that, for a moment, I checked my impulses of pity, and thought whether it would not be virtuous to imitate the Jews in Palestine, who, to this day, throw a pebble at Absalom's pillar, as they pass it in the King's Dale, to show their horror of the rebel's unnatural crime. But I finally concluded that it was better to be a Christian in my hate, as well as in my love, and to take no worse revenge than to recite, over the ashes of the regicides, that sweet prayer for the 30th of January, which magnifies God, for the grace given to the royal martyr, "by which he was enabled, in a constant meek suffering of all barbarous indignities, to resist unto blood, and then, according to the Saviour's pattern, to pray for his murderers." Two hundred years have gone, well-nigh, and those mean graves continue in their dishonour, while the monarchy which their occupants once supposed they had destroyed, is as unshaken as ever. Nor must it be unnoticed, that the church which they thought to pluck up, root and branch, has borne a healthful daughter, that chaunts her venerable service in another hemisphere, and so near these very graves that the bones of Goffe and Whalley must fairly shake at Christmas, when the organ swells, hard-by, with the voices of thronging worshippers, who still keep "the superstitious time of the Nativity," even in the Puritans' own land and city. What a conclusion to so much crime and bloodshed! Such a sepulture--thought I,--instead of a green little barrow, in some quiet churchyard of England, "fast by their fathers' graves!" Had these poor men been contented with peace and loyalty, such graves they might have found, under the eaves of the same parish church that registered their christening; the very bells tolling for their funeral, that pealed when they took their brides. How much better the "village Hampden," than the wide-world's Whalley; and how enviable the uncouth rhyme, and the yeoman's honest name, on the stone that loving hands have set, compared with these coward initials, and memorials that skulk in the grass! Sta, viator, _judicem_ calcas!