It is a New England custom, to bury all the dead of a township, or of a certain subdivision of it, in a common grave yard; usually, not within any village, and apart from any church. This yard is enclosed with a wall; and every grave is marked by a stone (commonly hewn marble,) with a neat and simple inscription of name and years, supplying "the place of fame and elegy." By a sort of tacit consent, each family is allowed to cluster its dead together in a separate portion of the ground; sometimes in a capacious vault, marked with the family name. The curious may at any time find an hour's amusement--aside from the more serious thoughts proper to the place--in reading, on the tombstones, the surnames common and peculiar to New England, and the Christian names--mostly scriptural--betokening the original and enduring sway of Puritanism. A southerner naturally wonders why the grave yards are without the villages. To an inquiry of mine into the reason, a _'cute_ female (evidently far wiser than her husband, who was also in company,) answered, that it was "to accommodate those who live at a distance." How it did this--or how, if the distant on one side were accommodated, those on the other were not equally incommoded--my sage instructress did not expound. The village itself (at least its ordinary _nucleus_, the meeting-house) is usually central to the town, for the equal convenience of all. It seems more probable that _health_, and the readier command of space, influence the location of burying grounds. One of the objects that have struck me most pleasingly, is the _Liberty Pole_, in almost every village. Its use is to hoist a flag upon, on the Fourth of July, and other festal days. It figures exquisitely in "McFingal"--that best poem, of its length, that America has produced; so often quoted for Hudibras, and so inadequately honored, not only in the south, but here, in its native north. Do take down the book, or, if you have it not, go straight and buy it; turn to the second or third canto--I forget which--and be grave if you can, while you read how the Tory hero "fierce sallied forth" attended by "His desperate clan of tory friends: When sudden met his angry eye A pole ascending thro' the sky:--" the ceremonies of its rearing and consecration; the attack, not _wordy_ alone, of the hero upon it; his inglorious discomfiture; his wadling flight, ("With legs and arms he worked his course, Like rider that outgoes his horse;") his fall, and decoration with tar and feathers; the hoisting of the tory constable by a rope fastened to his waistband, "Till, like the earth, as stretched on tenter, He hung, self-balanced, on his centre;" where, as Socrates (according to a witty comic poet of his day) got himself swung in mid air to clear his perceptions, "Our culprit thus in purer sky, With like advantage raised his eye; And looking forth in prospect wide, His _tory errors clearly spied_."