The early graves were frequently clustered, were even crowded in irregular groups in the churchyard; and in larger towns, the dead--especially persons of dignity--were buried, as in England, under the church. Sargent, in his "Dealings with the Dead," speaks at length of the latter custom, which prevailed to an inordinate extent in Boston. In smaller settlements some out-of-the-way spot was chosen for a common burial-place, in barren pasture or on lonely hillside, thus forcibly proving the well-known lines of Whittier, "Our vales are sweet with fern and rose, Our hills are maple crowned, But not from them our fathers chose The village burial ground. "The dreariest spot in all the land To Death they set apart; With scanty grace from Nature's hand And none from that of Art." To the natural loneliness of the country burial-place and to its inevitable sadness, is now too frequently added the gloomy and depressing evidence of human neglect. Briers and weeds grow in tangled thickets over the forgotten graves; birch-trees and barberry bushes spring up unchecked. In one a thriving grove of lilac bushes spreads its dusty shade from wall to wall. Winter-killed shrubs of flowering almond or snowballs, planted in tender memory, stand now withered and unheeded, and the few straggling garden flowers--crimson phlox or single hollyhocks--that still live only painfully accent the loneliness by showing that this now forgotten spot was once loved, visited, and cared for. In many cases the worn gravestone lies forlornly face downward; sometimes, "The slab has sunk; the head declined, And left the rails a wreck behind. No names; you trace a '6'--a '7,' Part of 'affliction' and of 'Heaven.' And then in letters sharp and clear, You read.--O Irony austere!-- 'Tho' lost to Sight, to Memory dear.'" "Truly our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly show us how we may be buried in our survivors.'" Still, this neglect and oblivion is just as satisfactory as was the officious "deed without a name" done in orderly Boston, where, in the first half of this century, a precise Superintendent of Graveyards and his army of assistants--what Charles Lamb called "sapient trouble-tombs"--straightened out mathematically all the old burial-places, levelled the earth, and set in trim military rows the old slate headstones, regardless of the irregular clusters of graves and their occupants. And there in Boston the falsifying old headstones still stand, fixed in new places, but marking no coffins or honored bones beneath; the only true words of their inscriptions being the opening ones "Here lies," and the motto that they repeat derisively to each other--"As you are now so once was I."