cription upon it was full of significant blanks; they seemed an
interrogation of the destiny which governs man.

"Here lies Peter Merrick----" ran the unfinished scroll, "and his wife
who died----"

But ambitious Peter never lay there at all; for in his later prime, with
one flash of sharp desire to see the world, he went on a voyage to the
Banks, and was drowned. And his wife? The story grows somewhat
threadbare. She summoned his step-brother to settle the estate, and he,
a marble-cutter by trade, filled in the date of Peter's death with
letters English and illegible. In the process of their carving, the
widow stood by, hands folded under her apron from the midsummer sun. The
two got excellent well acquainted, and the stone-cutter prolonged his
stay. He came again in a little over a year, at Thanksgiving time, and
they were married. Which shows that nothing is certain in life,--no, not
the proprieties of our leaving it,--and that even there we must walk
softly, writing no boastful legend for time to annul.

At one period a certain quatrain had a great run in Tiverton; it was the
epitaph of the day. Noting how it overspread that stony soil, you
picture to yourself the modest pride of its composer; unless indeed, it
had been copied from an older inscription in an English yard, and
transplanted through the heart and brain of some settler whose thoughts
were ever flitting back. Thus it runs in decorous metre:--

"Dear husband, now my life is passed, You have dearly loved me to the
last. Grieve not for me, but pity take On my dear children for my sake."

But one sorrowing widower amended it, according to his wife's direction,
so that it bore a new and significant meaning. He was charged to

"pity take On my dear parent for my sake."

The lesson was patent. His mother-in-law had always lived with him, and
she was "difficult." Who knows how keenly the sick woman's mind ran on
the possibilities of reef and quicksand for the alien two left alone
without her guiding hand? So she set the warning of her love and fear to
be no more forgotten while she herself should be remembered.

The husband was a silent man. He said very little about his intentions;
performance was enough for him. Therefore it happened that his "parent,"
adopted perforce, knew nothing about this public charge until she came
upon it, on her first Sunday visit, surveying the new glory of the
stone. The story goes that she stood before it, a square, portento