Let us go about and moralize cheaply on the tombstones, trailing the robe of pious reflection up and down the pathways of the grave. Here is a big and stately tomb sacred to “Lucia,” who died in 1776 A.D., aged 23. Here also be verses which an irreverent thumb can bring to light. Thus they wrote, when their hearts were heavy in them, one hundred and sixteen years ago: “What needs the emblem, what the plaintive strain, What all the arts that sculpture e’er expressed, To tell the treasure that these walls contain? Let those declare it most who knew her best. “The tender pity she would oft display Shall be with interest at her shrine returned, Connubial love, connubial tears repay, And Lucia loved shall still be Lucia mourned. “Though closed the lips, though stopped the tuneful breath, The silent, clay-cold monitress shall teach-- In all the alarming eloquence of death With double pathos to the heart shall preach. “Shall teach the virtuous maid, the faithful wife, If young and fair, that young and fair was she, Then close the useful lesson of her life, And tell them what she is, they soon must be.” That goes well, even after all these years, does it not? and seems to bring Lucia very near, in spite of what the later generation is pleased to call the stiltedness of the old-time verse. Who will declare the merits of Lucia--dead in her spring before there was even a _Hickey’s Gazette_ to chronicle the amusements of Calcutta, and publish, with scurrilous asterisks, the _liaisons_ of heads of departments? What pot-bellied East Indiaman brought the “virtuous maid” up the river, and did Lucia “make her bargain,” as the cant of those times went, on the first, second, or third day after her arrival? Or did she, with the others of the batch, give a spinsters’ ball as a last trial--following the custom of the country? No. She was a fair Kentish maiden, sent out, at a cost of five hundred pounds, English money, under the captain’s charge, to wed the man of her choice, and _he_ knew Clive well, had had dealings with Omichand, and talked to men who had lived through the terrible night in the Black Hole. He was a rich man, Lucia’s battered tomb proves it, and he gave Lucia all that her heart could wish. A green-painted boat to take the air in on the river of evenings. Coffree slave-boys who could play on the French horn, and even a very elegant, neat coach with a genteel rutlan roof ornamented with flowers very highly finished, ten best polished plate glasses, ornamented with a few elegant medallions enriched with mother-o’-pearl, that she might take her drive on the course as befitted a factor’s wife. All these things he gave her. And when the convoys came up the river, and the guns thundered, and the servants of the Honorable the East India Company drank to the king’s health, be sure that Lucia before all the other