Look from these at the old stone which the earthworms have been busy trying to bury for a century, until the lower half of the inscription is underground; the stone which the lichen has embossed and richly coloured; round which the grass grows so close and lovingly, and the small creeping ivy tries to cover. This which has been added to it is but a part of its beauty: you see that its lines are graceful, that they were made so; that the inscription--"Here lyeth the body," etc.--is not cut in letters in use in newspapers and advertising placards, and have therefore no common nor degrading associations, but are letters of other forms, graceful, too, in their lines; and that above the inscription there are sculptured and symbolic figures and lines--emblems of mortality, eternal hope, and a future life--heads of cherubs, winged and blowing on horns, and the sun and wings; skulls and crossbones, and hour-glass and scythe; the funeral urn and weeping-willow; the lighted torch; the heart in flames, or bleeding, or transfixed with arrows; the angel's trumpet, the crown of glory, the palm and the lily, the laurel leaf, and many more. {194} Did we think this art, or this custom, too little a thing to cherish any longer? I cannot find any person with a word to say about it. I have tried and the result was curious. I have invited persons of my acquaintance into an old churchyard and begged them to look on this stone and on this--the hard ugliness of one, an insult to the dead, and the beauty, the pathos, of the other. And they have immediately fallen into a melancholy silence, or else they have suddenly become angry, apparently for no cause. But the reason probably was that they had never given a thought to the subject, that when they had buried someone dear to them--a mother or wife or daughter--they simply went to the stonemason and ordered a gravestone, leaving him to fashion it in his own way. The reason of the reason--the full explanation of the singular fact that they, in these house-beautiful and generally art-worshipping times, had given no thought to the matter until it was unexpectedly sprung upon them; and that if they had lived, say, a hundred years ago, they would have given it some thought--this the reader will easily find out for himself. [Sidenote: Beauty of old gravestones]