The end of all living ( part 2)

decorum, beside the brother he hated; and thus does the greater good

wipe out the individual wrong.

So now, as in ancient times, we toil steeply up here, with the dead upon

his bier; for not often in Tiverton do we depend on that uncouth

monstrosity, the hearse. It is not that we do not own one,--a rigid box of

that name has belonged to us now for many a year; and when Sudleigh

came out with a new one, plumes, trappings, and all, we broached the

idea of emulating her. But the project fell through after Brad Freeman's

contented remark that he guessed the old one would last us out. He

"never heard no complaint from anybody 't ever rode in it." That placed

our last journey on a homely, humorous basis, and we smiled, and

reflected that we preferred going up the hill borne by friendly hands, with

the light of heaven falling on our coffin-lids.

The antiquary would set much store by our headstones, did he ever find

them out. Certain of them are very ancient, according to our ideas; for

they came over from England, and are now fallen into the grayness of

age. They are woven all over with lichens, and the blackberry binds them

fast. Well, too, for them! They need the grace of some such veiling; for

most of them are alive, even to this day, with warning skulls, and awful

cherubs compounded of bleak, bald faces and sparsely feathered wings.

One discovery, made there on a summer day, has not, I fancy, been

duplicated in another New England town. On six of the larger tombstones

are carved, below the grass level, a row of tiny imps, grinning faces and

humanized animals. Whose was the hand that wrought? The Tivertonians

know nothing about it. They say there was a certain old Veasey who,

some eighty odd years ago, used to steal into the graveyard with his

tools, and there, for love, scrape the mosses from the stones and chip the

letters clear. He liked to draw, "creatur's" especially, and would trace

them for children on their slates. He lived alone in a little house long since

fallen, and he would eat no meat. That is all they know of him. I can

guess but one thing more: that when no looker-on was by, he pushed

away the grass, and wrote his little jokes, safe in the kindly tolerance of

the dead. This was the identical soul who should, in good old days, have

been carving gargoyles and misereres; here his only field was the

obscurity of Tiverton churchyard, his only monument these grotesqueries

so cunningly concealed.We have epitaphs, too,--all our own as yet, for the world has not

discovered them. One couple lies in well-to-do respectability under a tiny

monument not much taller than the conventional gravestone, but shaped

on a pretentious model.

"We'd ruther have it nice," said the builders, "even if there ain't much of

it."

These were Eliza Marden and Peleg her husband, who worked from sun to

sun, with scant reward save that of pride in their own fore-handedness. I

can imagine them as they drove to church in the open wagon, a couple

portentously large and prosperous: their one child, Hannah, sitting

between them, and glancing about her, in a flickering, intermittent way,

at the pleasant holiday world. Hannah was no worker; she liked a long

afternoon in the sun, her thin little hands busied about nothing weightier

than crochet; and her mother regarded her with a horrified patience, as

one who might some time be trusted to sow all her wild oats of idleness.

The well-mated pair died within the same year, and it was Hannah who

composed their epitaph, with an artistic accuracy, but a defective sense of

rhyme:--

"Here lies Eliza

She was a striver

Here lies Peleg

He was a select Man"

We townsfolk found something haunting and bewildering in the lines; they

drew, and yet they baffled us, with their suggested echoes luring only to

betray. Hannah never wrote anything else, but we always cherished the

belief that she could do "'most anything" with words and their

possibilities. Still, we accepted her one crowning achievement, and never

urged her to further proof. In Tiverton we never look genius in the mouth.

Nor did Hannah herself propose developing her gift. Relieved from the

spur of those two unquiet spirits who had begotten her, she settled down

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