"No! I'll be hanged if I bury her there," said the old man in great wrath. "I'll bury her in the graveyard." New England can boast her beautiful places of sculpture, but as a common thing they are too much neglected, and attractive only to the lover of oddities and curious old epitaphs. Occasionally you may see a strangely shaped tomb, or as in a well-known village, a knocker placed on the door of his family vault by some odd specimen of humanity. When asked the reason for doing so singular a thing, he gravely replied that "when the old gentleman should come to claim his own, the tenants might have the pleasure of saying, 'not at home,' or of fleeing out of the back door." In passing through these neglected grounds you will often find some touchingly beautiful scriptural allusion--some apt quotation or some emblem so lovely and instructive that the memory of it will go with you for days. Here in a neglected spot and amid a cluster of raised stones is the grave of the stranger clergyman's child, who died on its journey. The inscription is sweet when taken in connection with the portion of sacred history from which the quotation is made: "Is it well with the child? And she answered, It is well." Again, the only inscription is an emblem--a butterfly rising from the chrysalis. Glorious thought, embodied in emblem so singular! "Sown in corruption, raised in incorruption!" Then come you to some strangely odd, as for instance: "Here lies John Auricular, Who in the ways of the Lord walked perpendicular" Again: "Many a cold wind o'er my body shall roll While in Abraham's bosom I'm feasting my soul" appropriate certainly, as the grave was on a cold northeast slope of one of our bleak hills. Again, a Dutchman's epitaph for his twin babes: "Here lies two babes, dead as two nits, Who shook to death mit ague fits. They was too good to live mit me. So God He took 'em to live mit He." There is the grave of a young man who, dying suddenly, was eulogized with this strange aim at the sublime: "He lived, He died!" Not a hundred miles from Boston is a gravestone the epitaph upon which, to all who knew the parties, borders strongly upon the burlesque. A widower who within a few months buried his wife and adopted daughter, the former of whom was all her life long a thorn in his flesh, and whose death could not but have been a relief, wrote thus: "They were lovely and beloved in their lives, and in death were not divided." Poor man! Well _he_ knew how full of strife and sorrow an evil woman can make life! He was worn to a shadow before her death, and his hair was all gone. Many of the neighbors thought surely that _he_ well knew what had become of it, especially as it disappeared by the handful. But the grave covers all faults; and those who knew her could only hope that she might rest from her labors and her works follow her!