In many of our village parlors, sometimes in the guest-chambers, when there had been many deaths in the family, hung the framed coffin-plates and faded funeral wreaths of departed dear ones. Now and then there was a wreath of wool flowers, a triumph of domestic art, which encircled the coffin-plate instead of the original funeral garland. Mrs. Jameson set herself to work to abolish this grimly pathetic New England custom with all her might. She did everything but actually tear them from our walls. That, even in her fiery zeal of improvement, she did not quite dare attempt. She made them a constant theme of conversation at sewing circle and during her neighborly calls. She spoke of the custom quite openly as grewsome and barbarous, but I must say without much effect. Mrs. Jameson found certain strongholds of long-established customs among us which were impregnable to open rancor or ridicule--and that was one of them. The coffin-plates and the funeral wreaths continued to hang in the parlors and chambers. Once Flora Clark told Mrs. Jameson to her face, in the sewing circle, when she had been talking for a good hour about the coffin-plates, declaring them to be grewsome and shocking, that, for her part, she did not care for them, did not have one in her house--though every one of her relations were dead, and she might have her walls covered with them--but she believed in respecting those who did; and it seemed to her that, however much anybody felt called upon to interfere with the ways of the living, the relics of the dead should be left alone. Flora concluded by saying that it seemed to her that if the Linnville folks let Mrs. Jameson's bean-pots alone, she might keep her hands off their coffin-plates. Mrs. Jameson was quite unmoved even by that. She said that Miss Clark did not realize, as she would do were her sphere wider, the incalculable harm that such a false standard of art might do in a community: that it might even pervert the morals. "I guess if we don't have anything to hurt our morals any worse than our coffin-plates, we shall do," returned Flora. She said afterward that she felt just like digging up some of her own coffin-plates, and having them framed and hung up, and asking Mrs. Jameson to tea.