as I have observed, in Scotland alone; but, strange as it may seem, Scotland and Ireland when they write gravestone inscriptions have one habit in common, that of beginning their epitaphs, not with the name of the deceased person, but with the name of the person who provides the stone. Thus:-- Erected by William Brown to his Father John Brown, etc., etc. [Footnote 14: It has been suggested to me that these "tombs" were the luxuries of the wealthier inhabitants.] [Illustration: FIG. 95. BLAIRGOWRIE.] [Illustration: FIG. 96. LAUFEN. 1. Cut into stone. 2. Anchor of iron on dwarf stone pillar. 3. Heart and anchor of thin iron on dwarf stone pillar. 4. Iron plate and rod. 5. Wooden cross. 6. Wooden cross.] CHAPTER XII. OLD GRAVESTONES ABROAD. "Abroad" is a big place, and no sufficient treatment under the head of this chapter is possible except to one who has had very great experience and extended research. Nevertheless I may, with all due diffidence and modesty, tell the little I know on the subject. My opportunities of investigation have been few, and restricted to a limited area--so restricted and so limited that I cannot tell whether or not the observations I have made may be taken as indications of national habits or merely as idiosyncrasies of the people inhabiting the particular localities which I was able to visit. All the churchyards which I have seen in France, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland very much resemble each other, and are altogether unlike the graveyards of Great Britain and her children. It is to the villages we should naturally go for primitive memorials of the dead, but in all the continental villages which I have visited memorials of a permanent character, either old or new, are scarcely to be seen. Occasionally a stone slab may be encountered, but almost always of recent date. At Laufen in the Canton of Zurich, near the Falls of the Rhine, I selected almost at random the examples of memorials shewn in my sketch (Fig. 96), one or other of which was at the head of nearly every grave. FIG. 96.--AT LAUFEN. The average height of these mementoes was about 2 feet, and all the dates which I saw were of the last twenty-five years. Permanence indeed is apparently not considered as it is with us in the like circumstances. The British gravestone is trusted to perpetuate at least the names of our departed friends down to the days of our posterity, but the provision made by our neighbours seems to have been for the existing generation only. Posterity does not trouble the villagers of Switzerland nor their prototypes of other nations around them. This fact was strongly exemplified at Neuhausen, a small place on the other bank of the Rhine, "five minutes from Germany" we were told. FIG. 97.--AT NEUHAUSEN.