This is one of the chief places of interest which everybody is anxious to point out; for next to the city of the living they cherish the city of their dead. It is here they come to while away their leisure hours, and bring the fresh flowers of every season to lay above the dust of their departed--for you seldom see an undecorated grave. The Magnolia Cemetery is about three miles from the city; we pass first through a grand avenue to the German burial-ground, which is beautifully kept, with shining white walks winding among blooming flower beds and rare shrubberies, shaded by grand old oaks, clothed in their mantles of soft grey moss. Carved upon the headstones the solemn words “Her ruhet in Gott” meet the eye at every turn. Passing through this grave-garden, we soon come to the main entrance to Magnolia Cemetery; within the massive gates a colossal bell is suspended from a lofty scaffolding, which tolls slowly as the funeral approaches; a pretty Gothic chapel, where the services are held, stands to the left. Passing under the archway we come upon a few score of white wooden headstones, which stand like special guardians at the gates of death; beneath these lie the Federal dead. Farther on lies the wide Confederate burial-ground; here, side by side, and rank on rank, by hundreds--nay, by thousands--lie the soldiers of the lost cause sleeping their last sleep, happily unconscious of the ruin that fell on the land they loved before yet the grass grew over their graves. Few, very few, have an inscription to mark who rests beneath, but soft green hillocks swell in low waves on all sides of us; these hide the unknown dead, and over them are daisies and sweet wild flowers growing. Beyond these again lie the more fortunate, who have died at home, surrounded by friends and kindred, and fitly mourned in monuments of marble; there are symbolical urns and broken columns, groups of mourning friends in every possible or impossible attitudes of depression; there is a cherub blowing a trumpet as though striving to wake up the heavenly host with the news “another recruit is coming.” He is blowing so hard he seems to have blown himself out of his draperies, which are fluttering in the wind behind him, and weeping angels are drying their eyes with stony pocket-handkerchiefs, as though bemoaning that all the virtues of all the world lay perishing beneath them--at least, so says the inscription written there. As it always happens in the great cemeteries of north, south, east, and west, some of the departed are mourned in doggerel rhyme, some in ungrammatical prose. I think that many would rise up from their silent beds and wipe out these effusions if they could; but the dead have no remedy against the imbecilities of the living. One feels disposed to envy the unknown dead whose worth is chronicled and memory kept green in the hearts that loved them, with no marble monument to point the place where they lie “carved in dust.”