I am prepared to make a wager with any responsible party that in a match for the championship of lying, a tombstone would beat Ananias with Sapphira thrown in, and will give odds. _Hic jacet_ is literally true, and about the only true thing the majority of tombstones say. If the ghosts of the late deceased--who are always eminent--are permitted to stroll about cemeteries at their leisure, their astonishment at reading their epitaphs must be of the most supernatural character. A miser, whose small soul in his earthly life could not have been found with a microscope, is astonished to discover, that he was a liberal-hearted man and a benefactor, with distant allusions to the possibility of his having been an angel in disguise. A man who went through the world without the responsibility of a single moral principle under his vest, suddenly finds that he was possessed of all the cardinal virtues, and is written down on cool marble as an exemplar for the rising generation. A woman who, in the earthly tabernacle, was the lingual scourge of her neighborhood, discovers that she was the loveliest of her sex, and is now an angel with the handsomest wings to be found in the whole ornithological tribe of the upper air. A man whose highest ambition was to go through life quietly, doing as much good as he could for his fellows, and to go out of life like a gentleman, finds himself kicking up posthumous dust under a huge monument of the most elaborate description, gaudy with gilding, wreaths, chaplets, urns, torches and flowers. Considering the number of nuisances among the living, the quantity of angels and cherubs in every graveyard is appalling, and it becomes a question worthy of consideration by the Academy of Sciences--the ultimate destination of the sinners and poor devils. All known grave yards are devoted exclusively to saints. In what _ignota terra_ rest the bones of the sinners? Now, I submit that a live man has some rights which a tombstone is bound to respect, and that when old Sniffles, who swindled me unmercifully, the other day, without any compunction, shuffles off his miserable coil, his tombstone shall not tell me he was a pink of honesty. And again, are we not overdoing the thing in regard to funerals? I have already shown in these letters that one can hardly afford to die now-a-days, owing to the expense. This expense grows out of the fact that we are letting fashion act as mistress of ceremonies on these occasions. It is not enough that fashion has made asses of us, and tricked us out with her fantastic nonsense all our lives, but, even after the curtain has fallen, the lights are turned off, the audience have gone home, and the house is shut up, fashion still persists in hanging its gewgaws upon the outside walls.