"This humble stone, in Memory of Elizabeth Whitman, is inscribed by her weeping friends, to whom she endeared herself by uncommon tenderness and affection. Endowed with superior genius and acquirements, she was still more endeared by humility and benevolence. Let candour throw a veil over her frailities, for great was her charity to others.--She sustained the last painful scene far from every friend, and exhibited an example of calm resignation. Her departure was on the 25th of July, A.D. 1788, in the 37th year of her age, and the tears of strangers watered her grave." Although we recollect seeing the stone some years ago, when the whole inscription could be read, we visited the spot in April, 1885, and found only a small portion left,--a triangular piece, perhaps a foot and a half high on one side, at the bottom of which we could only make out: "A.D. 1788, ... the tears of strangers watered her grave." For years, young persons of a romantic turn of mind have visited the grave and chipped off small pieces of the freestone for relics. This modern habit of chipping monumental stones for relics is inexcusable; for it is not done by ignorant or otherwise lawless persons, but too often by the educated, who carry their mawkish sentiment to such an extreme as to deface and sometimes, as in the present case, entirely to ruin a monument. It is in vain to urge that this was only a stranger's stone, and that there were none to care. It was all the more an outrage, if there were no friends to protect it. We are glad to learn that there were people in the town who did what they could to prevent this sacrilege. The following account of this unfortunate lady we take from Hanson's "History of Danvers:"-- "Elizabeth Whitman came from a very respectable family in Connecticut, where her father was a clergyman. She was possessed of an ardent poetical temperament, an inordinate love of praise, and was gifted with the natural endowment of beauty and perfect grace, while she was accomplished with those refinements which education can bestow. She was lovely beyond words. But her natural amiabilities were warped and perverted by reading great numbers of romances, to the exclusion of almost all other reading. She formed her idea of men by the exaggerated standards she saw in the books to which she resorted; and thus when she looked around her she saw no one who realized her ideal. She subsequently became intimate with a lawyer, said to be the Honourable (?) Judge Pierpont Edwards."