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