Of course, Gabriel and Evangeline are buried nowhere, as they never existed, save in the imagination of the poet. The poem he calls “A Tale of Acadie,” a “mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest.” Still, it is astonishing that so many who have read the poem have believed in the actuality of the tradition in its relation of chief characters, in its Evangeline and her lover, and have sought their graves at these three Catholic graveyards. St. Joseph’s now has no burial ground attached to the church. It had originally, but after 1759 the dead of the congregation were interred in the ground across the street, and, after 1763, called St. Mary’s Street. Longfellow’s poem represents the time of the meeting, death and burial, as occurring during a pestilence. This was the yellow fever of 1793, as no general epidemic had occurred in the city from the time of the coming of the Acadians in November, 1755, until that awful pestilence of 1793 ravaged the city. But St. Joseph’s, in that year, had no burial ground at the church. The latest interment I know of was that of Father Farmer, August, 1786. Perhaps a few persons holding lots might have been permitted to inter in that graveyard after the opening of St. Mary’s ground in 1759, but most unlikely that Gabriel, an inmate of the city almshouse, would have been brought there for burial, and later Evangeline laid in a grave “side by side” by his. So, though Old St. Joseph’s--mainly because it is called Old, and because of the nearness of the Quakers’ Almshouse (torn down in 1874), which many have supposed to have been the almshouse Longfellow had in mind--is the most probable place of the burial of the lovers, in the belief of many, including usually well informed “Penn,” of the _Evening Bulletin_, who, on October 12, 1898, declared that as Evangeline had long been a Sister, who knew the city and its seamy side, she, like a good Catholic, could have saved his body from being buried in the potter’s field, and would have carried it to the ground of Old St. Joseph’s. (It is to be remarked that Philadelphia had no Sisters of Mercy then, nor Sisters of any Order until 1814, when the Sisters of Charity came from Mrs. Seton’s to take charge of St. Joseph’s Orphan Asylum, on Sixth Street.) St. Mary’s, on Fourth Street, almost directly opposite to St. Joseph’s, is not so often called at nor so frequently assigned as the supposed place of interment. To the opinions of those, who have supposed that either of these “churchyards” was the one Longfellow had in mind when writing the poem, I, years ago suggested that Holy Trinity Churchyard, on Sixth Street, was the most likely place--the place most probable--the one which Longfellow saw and years after had in mind. The City Almshouse, at the time of the fever in 1793, was on Spruce Street, south side, from Tenth to Eleventh Streets. It was there when, in 1824, Longfellow visited the city.