were Eliza Marden and Peleg her husband, who worked from sun to
sun, with scant reward save that of pride in their own forehandedness. I
can imagine them as they drove to church in the open wagon, a couple
portentously large and prosperous: their one child, Hannah, sitting
between them, and glancing about her, in a flickering, intermittent way,
at the pleasant holiday world. Hannah was no worker; she liked a long
afternoon in the sun, her thin little hands busied about nothing
weightier than crochet; and her mother regarded her with a horrified
patience, as one who might some time be trusted to sow all her wild oats
of idleness. The well-mated pair died within the same year, and it was
Hannah who composed their epitaph, with an artistic accuracy, but a
defective sense of rhyme:--

"Here lies Eliza She was a striver Here lies Peleg He was a select Man"

We townsfolk found something haunting and bewildering in the lines; they
drew, and yet they baffled us, with their suggested echoes luring only
to betray. Hannah never wrote anything else, but we always cherished the
belief that she could do "'most anything" with words and their
possibilities. Still, we accepted her one crowning achievement, and
never urged her to further proof. In Tiverton we never look genius in
the mouth. Nor did Hannah herself propose developing her gift. Relieved
from the spur of those two unquiet spirits who had begotten her, she
settled down 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 ins