xtracted.
How many weeks will she find it a pleasure to make morning visits here
and plait pretty flowers on the grave of her husband?--The grave in the
next inclosure furnishes an answer to the question. A few months ago,
it, too, was tended at sunrise by just such a tearful woman; but now the
wreaths of evergreen are yellow, and the weeds are springing up among
the withered garlands. The living partner has visited already the
"mitigated grief" department of the mourning store, and the severed
cords of her affections have been spliced and made almost as good as
new. Not that I would not have it so; not that I believe the grief of
woman to be less real and sincere than man's, though it _be_ enjoyed;
not that I would have her thrum a long mournful threnody on the
harpstrings of her heart, and waste on the dead, who need them not,
affections which, Heaven knows, the living need too much.

Retracing my steps, and descending the opposite slope of the hill, I
entered a beautiful vale covered with stately tombs and containing a
little lake, in the middle of which a fountain was springing high into
the air. In a spot so much frequented at a later hour of the day only a
single human being was in sight,--a young man, perhaps five-and-twenty
years of age, jauntily dressed, and his upper lip adorned with a long
moustache, who was leaning lazily upon a marble balustrade, and staring,
with a stupid, vacant look, at the massive monument it surrounded. As
nothing appeared at the moment more attractive to my eyes, I fixed them
upon him. No great skill in deciphering human character is required to
tell his past or foretell his future history, or even to read the few
poor spent thoughts that flicker in his brain. His father--some city
merchant--died last year, and left him a man of leisure, with a fortune
on his hands to spend in idleness and dissipation. This is the first
anniversary of the old gentleman's decease and departure to another and
better world, and the hopeful heir of his bank-stock and buildings has,
as a matter of etiquette, come out here from the city this morning to
pass an hour of solemn meditation--as he calls the sixty minutes in
which he does not smoke or swear--by the old man's grave. I observe him
every moment forming a firm resolution to fix his feeble thoughts upon
sober things and his latter end, and breaking it the second afterwards:
the effort is too much for the exhausted condition of his mind, and
results in