Country Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago: Personal recollections and reminiscences of a sexagenarianHaight, Canniff
History
Country Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago: Personal recollections and reminiscences of a sexagenarian
Haight, Canniff
Frontier and pioneer life -- Ontario; Ontario -- Social life and customs
During another visit to the neighbourhood of my birth, after having tea
with the Rev. H---, Rector of ----, I took a stroll through the
graveyard that nearly surrounds the old church, and spent some time in
reading the inscriptions on the headstones. There were numbers that were
new and strange, but the most of them bore names that were familiar.
Time, of course, had left his mark, and in some cases the lettering was
almost gone. Many of those silent sleepers I remembered well, and had
followed their remains to the grave, and had heard the old Rector
pronounce the last sad rite: "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to
dust," long years ago. As I passed on from grave to grave of former
friends and neighbours,
"Each in his narrow cell forever laid,"
many curious and pleasing collections were brought to mind. I came at
last to the large vault of the first Rector, who was among the first in
the Province. I recollected well the building of this receptacle for the
dead, and how his family, one after another, were placed in it; and then
the summons came to him, and he was laid there. A few years later, his
wife, the last survivor of the family, was put there too, and the large
slabs were shut down for the last time, closing the final chapter of
this family history, and--as does not often happen in this world--they
were taking their last sleep undivided. But Time, the great destroyer,
had been at work during the years that had fled, and I was sorry to find
that the slabs that covered the upper part of the vault, and which bore
the inscriptions, were broken, and that the walls were falling in. There
were no friends left to interest themselves in repairing the crumbling
structure, and in a few years more the probabilities are that every
vestige of the last resting-place of this united couple will be gone. It
is not a pleasing thought, and yet it is true, that however much we may
be loved, and however many friends may follow us with tears to the
grave, in a few short years they will be gone, and no one left to care
for us, or perhaps know that we ever lived. I have stood of an evening
in the grand cemetery of Pere la Chaise, Paris and watched the people
trooping in with their wreaths of _immortelles_ to be placed on the
tombs of departed friends, and others with cans of water and flowers to
plant around the graves. Here and there could be seen where some loved
one had been sprinkling the delicate flowers, or remained to water them
with their tears. This respect paid to the memory of departed ones is
pleasant, and yet, alas, how very few, after two or three generations
are remembered. The name that meets the eye on one stone after another
might as well be a blank for all we know of them. Anyone who has visited
the old churchyards or ruined abbeys in England must have felt this, as
his gaze has rested on time-worn tablets from which every mark had long
since been obliterated,
"By time subdued (what will not time subdue)!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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