morning, with the night-dews and the death-dews mingled on his
forehead.

Let us have one look at poor Benjamin's grave,--said I.--His bones lie
where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone says they
lie,--which is more than can be said of most of the tenants of this
and several other burial-grounds.

[The most accursed act of Vandalism ever committed within my knowledge
was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at least of our
city burial-grounds, and one at least just outside the city, and
planting them in rows to suit the taste for symmetry of the
perpetrators. Many years ago, when this disgraceful process was going
on under my eyes, I addressed an indignant remonstrance to a leading
journal. I suppose it was deficient in literary elegance, or too warm
in its language; for no notice was taken of it, and the hyena-horror
was allowed to complete itself in the face of daylight. I have never
got over it. The bones of my own ancestors, being entombed, lie
beneath their own tablet; but the upright stones have been shuffled
about like chessmen, and nothing short of the Day of Judgment will
tell whose dust lies beneath any of those records, meant by affection
to mark one small spot as sacred to some cherished memory. Shame!
shame! shame!--that is all I can say. It was on public thoroughfares,
under the eye of authority, that this infamy was enacted. The red
Indians would have known better; the selectmen of an African
kraal-village would have had more respect for their ancestors. I
should like to see the gravestones which have been disturbed all
removed, and the ground levelled, leaving the flat tombstones;
epitaphs were never famous for truth, but the old reproach of "Here
lies" never had such a wholesale illustration as in these outraged
burial-places, where the stone does lie above, and the bones do not
lie beneath.]

Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman's sigh over poor
Benjamin's dust. Love killed him, I think. Twenty years old, and out
there fighting another young fellow on the Common, in the cool of that
old July evening;--yes, there must have been love at the bottom of it.

The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through the
rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge. That was all her
comment upon what I told her.--How women love Love! said I;--but she
did not speak.

We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from
the main street.--Look