The end of all living (part 3)

to sit all day in the sun, learning new patterns of crochet; and having

cheerfully let her farm run down, she died at last in a placid poverty.

Then there was Desire Baker, who belonged to the era of colonial

hardship, and who, through a redundant punctuation, is relegated to a

day still more remote. For some stone-cutter, scornful of working by the

card, or born with an inordinate taste for periods, set forth, below her

_obiit_, the astounding statement:--

"The first woman. She made the journey to Boston. By stage."

Here, too, are the ironies whereof departed life is prodigal. This is the tidy

lot of Peter Merrick, who had a desire to stand well with the world, in

leaving it, and whose purple and fine linen were embodied in the pomp of

death. He was a cobbler, and he put his small savings together to erect a

modest monument to his own memory. Every Sunday he visited it, "after

meetin'," and perhaps his day-dreams, as he sat leather-aproned on his

bench, were still of that white marble idealism. The inscription upon it was

full of significant blanks; they seemed an interrogation of the destiny

which governs man.

"Here lies Peter Merrick----" ran the unfinished scroll, "and his wife who

died----"

But ambitious Peter never lay there at all; for in his later prime, with one

flash of sharp desire to see the world, he went on a voyage to the Banks,

and was drowned. And his wife? The story grows somewhat threadbare.

She summoned his step-brother to settle the estate, and he, a marble-

cutter by trade, filled in the date of Peter's death with letters English and

illegible. In the process of their carving, the widow stood by, hands folded

under her apron from the midsummer sun. The two got excellent well

acquainted, and the stone-cutter prolonged his stay. He came again in a

little over a year, at Thanksgiving time, and they were married. Which

shows that nothing is certain in life,--no, not the proprieties of our leaving

it,--and that even there we must walk softly, writing no boastful legend

for time to annul.At one period a certain quatrain had a great run in Tiverton; it was the

epitaph of the day. Noting how it overspread that stony soil, you picture

to yourself the modest pride of its composer; unless, indeed, it had been

copied from an older inscription in an English yard, and transplanted

through the heart and brain of some settler whose thoughts were ever

flitting back. Thus it runs in decorous metre:--

"Dear husband, now my life is passed,

You have dearly loved me to the last.

Grieve not for me, but pity take

On my dear children for my sake."

But one sorrowing widower amended it, according to his wife's direction,

so that it bore a new and significant meaning. He was charged to

"pity take

On my dear parent for my sake."

The lesson was patent. His mother-in-law had always lived with him, and

she was "difficult." Who knows how keenly the sick woman's mind ran on

the possibilities of reef and quicksand for the alien two left alone without

her guiding hand? So she set the warning of her love and fear to be no

more forgotten while she herself should be remembered.

The husband was a silent man. He said very little about his intentions;

performance was enough for him. Therefore it happened that his

"parent," adopted perforce, knew nothing about this public charge until

she came upon it, on her first Sunday visit, surveying the new glory of the

stone. The story goes that she stood before it, a square, portentous figure

in black alpaca and warlike mitts, and that she uttered these irrevocable

words:--

"Pity on _me_! Well, I guess he won't! I'll go to the poor-farm fust!"

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