“I have lived at such a table all my days,” said he, “and eaten no small quantity of slate and marble.” “Hard fare,” rejoined I, smiling, “but you seemed to have found it excellent of digestion, too.” A man of fifty or thereabouts with a harsh, unpleasant countenance ordered a stone for the grave of his bitter enemy, with whom he had waged warfare half a lifetime, to their mutual misery and ruin. The secret of this phenomenon was that hatred had become the sustenance and enjoyment of the poor wretch’s soul; it had supplied the place of all kindly affections; it had been really a bond of sympathy between himself and the man who shared the passion; and when its object died, the unappeasable foe was the only mourner for the dead. He expressed a purpose of being buried side by side with his enemy. “I doubt whether their dust will mingle,” remarked the old sculptor to me; for often there was an earthliness in his conceptions. “Oh yes,” replied I, who had mused long upon the incident; “and when they rise again, these bitter foes may find themselves dear friends. Methinks what they mistook for hatred was but love under a mask.” A gentleman of antiquarian propensities provided a memorial for an Indian of Chabbiquidick—one of the few of untainted blood remaining in that region, and said to be a hereditary chieftain descended from the sachem who welcomed Governor Mayhew to the Vineyard. Mr. Wiggles-worth exerted his best skill to carve a broken bow and scattered sheaf of arrows in memory of the hunters and warriors whose race was ended here, but he likewise sculptured a cherub, to denote that the poor Indian had shared the Christian’s hope of immortality. “Why,” observed I, taking a perverse view of the winged boy and the bow and arrows, “it looks more like Cupid’s tomb than an Indian chief’s.” “You talk nonsense,” said the sculptor, with the offended pride of art. He then added with his usual good-nature, “How can Cupid die when there are such pretty maidens in the Vineyard?” “Very true,” answered I; and for the rest of the day I thought of other matters than tombstones. At our next meeting I found him chiselling an open book upon a marble headstone, and concluded that it was meant to express the erudition of some black-letter clergyman of the Cotton Mather school. It turned out, however, to be emblematical of the scriptural knowledge of an old woman who had never read anything but her Bible, and the monument was a tribute to her piety and good works from the orthodox church of which she had been a member. In strange contrast with this Christian woman’s memorial was that of an infidel whose gravestone, by his own direction, bore an avowal of his belief that the spirit within him would be extinguished like a flame, and that the nothingness whence he sprang would receive him again. Mr. Wigglesworth consulted me as to the propriety of enabling a dead man’s dust to utter this dreadful creed.