with the greatest respect—but I venture to think that cremation will not be taken up very largely until a few such men as the Archbishop of York, the Chief Rabbi, the Rev. Prebendary Webb Peploe, and Father Staunton pronounce in its favour. Then it would soon be necessary to have a crematorium in every cemetery. [Illustration: THE COLUMBARIUM AT KENSAL GREEN.] It is morbid and useless to make previous preparation for death, except by life insurance, a proper will, and other business-like arrangements for the benefit of survivors. It is foolish to erect, as many have done, a tomb during lifetime (like the Miller’s tomb on Highdown Hill, Sussex), to keep a coffin under the bed, or to have a picture of a skeleton always on the wall. Such eccentric practices as that of the gentleman who died in a house by Hyde Park, and, at his wish, had his body kept in a coffin under a glass case on the roof of the house, are not to be admired. We can never forget that our life here will have its ending, our friends, companions, and neighbours are constantly leaving us, our daily paper has its daily obituary column, and surely no artificial method is needed to remind us of this fact. Cowper has said: “Like crowded forest-trees we stand, And some are marked to fall; The axe will smite at God’s command, And soon shall smite us all.” The utmost we need do, if we do not want our bodies to rest in the cemeteries, is to tell our friends that we wish them cremated, or buried in perishable coffins, or quietly laid in some far-off, rural spot. All else we may leave—it is in higher hands than ours; and already the Church on earth, imperfect, faulty, and divided though she be, has “mystic, sweet communion With those whose rest is won.” A few words in closing about the future of the disused burial-grounds in London. I think they are tolerably safe now. I have attempted to show how many there still are, closed and idle, or being used for a totally wrong purpose, between Hampstead and Plumstead, Hammersmith and Bow; but they are surely, if but slowly, being reclaimed and changed, one by one, into places of rest and recreation for the living. The public mind has so far awaked to the necessity of securing all the breathing-spaces which may be had, that the smallest corner of land in which interments can have been said to have taken place now forms a subject of litigation if attempts are made to build upon it. Preservation is the first step upon the ladder, acquisition the next, while conversion crowns them all.