it's a very mournful reflection--here rests a man
who spent sixty-seven years considering how he should get a good idea.
The object of his life was to say a good thing, and at last he felt
convinced in his own mind that he had got one, and was so glad of it
that he died of pure joy at having caught an idea at last. Nobody
derived any benefit from it, and no one even heard what the good thing
was. Now, I can fancy that this same good thing won't let him live
quiet in his grave; for let us suppose that it is a good thing which
can only be brought out at breakfast if it is to make an effect, and
that he, according to the received opinion concerning ghosts, can only
rise and walk at midnight. Why, then the good thing would not suit the
time, and the man must carry his good idea down with him again. What
an unhappy man he must be!

Here rests a remarkably stingy woman. During her lifetime she used to
get up at night and mew, so that the neighbours might think she kept a
cat--she was so remarkably stingy.

Here is a maiden of another kind. When the canary bird of the heart
begins to chirp, reason puts her fingers in her ears. The maiden was
going to be married, but--well, it's an every-day story, and we will
let the dead rest.

Here sleeps a widow who carried melody in her mouth and gall in her
heart. She used to go out for prey in the families round about; and
the prey she hunted was her neighbours' faults, and she was an
indefatigable hunter.

Here's a family sepulchre. Every member of this family held so firmly
to the opinions of the rest, that if all the world, and the newspapers
into the bargain, said of a certain thing it is so and so, and the
little boy came home from school and said, "I've learned it thus and
thus," they declared his opinion to be the only true one, because he
belonged to the family. And it is an acknowledged fact, that if the
yard-cock of the family crowed at midnight, they would declare it was
morning, though the watchmen and all the clocks in the city were
crying out that it was twelve o'clock at night.

The great poet Goethe concludes his "Faust" with the words "may be
continued;" and our wanderings in the churchyard may be continued too.
If any of my friends, or my non-friends, go on too fast for me, I go
out to my favourite spot and select a mound, and bury him or her
there--bury that person who is yet alive; and there those I bury must
stay till they come back as new and improved characte