Let us now make a journey to one of the world’s wonderful graveyards. It is, in the first instance, wonderful for its great age. Is it then that acre on Coles’ Hill, sown with the graves of those who came in the Mayflower, with sweet Rose Standish in their midst? No; that in comparison is but of yesterday. Is it the graveyard at Battle Abbey, where, after the defeat of Harold the Saxon, Norman and Saxon lay down together in the peace of death? No; that in comparison is most modern. Is it the rock tombs of the Pharaohs before Moses? No; those tombs compared with this graveyard are newest possible fashions. The dead Pharaohs lie in their tombs in Egypt, with their servants and even the beasts and birds of their day, all turned into mummies. These mummies are so hard that many thousands of them have been chopped up for fuel by the Egyptians. This is a queer use for dead kings! The creatures laid in the burial-ground where we shall now go, are turned not into wood, but stone. I think I see the little genii and gnomes guarding them well through all the countless ages since they died. Come then to this very ancient burial-ground. We trot briskly over a long, level stretch of prairie land, and now our stout horses fall from trotting to walking slowly up the steep hill. The wheels grind on the bare rocks; on the road-sides among the gray stones gleam patches of cinquefoil, blue-grass, and strawberry. Now the long faces of the horses no longer front the ascent, but the sharp crest is reached, and they look down upon the narrow valley into which the road suddenly falls. Across the valley lifts another range of hills, and these are colored like a map of various countries, by the masses of white dog-wood, rosy red-bud, purple birch in its soft springtime haze, green of young maple leaves, and the gold, rose, and bronze of the unfolding oak leaves. Just here, in the midst of this flowery beauty, the roving eye detects on the road-side a gravestone with a well-cut inscription. Lo! here we are in one of the world’s most ancient burial-grounds. Here are the monuments; here the mummy-cases; here are the unburied bones. We can scoop them up by handfuls. How old is this graveyard? Who can tell? How long are the ages of geology? No doubt these dead were laid down here hundreds of thousands of years ago. Most ancient then is it not, and well worthy of our visit?