ted. "I shall arise in thine image," runs the inscription; and
reading it, you shall remember that the dust within belonged to a little
hunchback, who played the fiddle divinely, and had beseeching eyes. With
that cry he escaped from the marred conditions of the clay. Here, too
(for this is a sort of bachelor nook), is the grave of a man whom we
unconsciously thrust into a permanent masquerade. Years and years ago he
broke into a house,--an unknown felony in our quiet limits,--and was
incontinently shot. The burglar lost his arm, and went about at first
under a cloud of disgrace and horror, which became, with healing of the
public conscience, a veil of sympathy. After his brief imprisonment
indoors, during the healing of the mutilated stump, he came forth among
us again, a man sadder and wiser in that he had learned how slow and
sure may be the road to wealth. He had sown his wild oats in one night's
foolish work, and now he settled down to doing such odd jobs as he might
with one hand. We got accustomed to his loss. Those of us who were
children when it happened never really discovered that it was disgrace
at all; we called it misfortune, and no one said us nay. Then one day it
occurred to us that he must have been shot "in the war," and so, all
unwittingly to himself, the silent man became a hero. We accepted him.
He was part of our poetic time, and when he died, we held him still in
remembrance among those who fell worthily. When Decoration Day was first
observed in Tiverton, one of us thought of him, and dropped some apple
blossoms on his grave; and so it had its posy like the rest, although it
bore no flag. It was the doctor who set us right there. "I wouldn't do
that," he said, withholding the hand of one unthinking child; and she
took back her flag. But she left the blossoms, and, being fond of
precedent, we still do the same; unless we stop to think, we know not
why. You may say there is here some perfidy to the republic and the
honored dead, or at least some laxity of morals. We are lax, indeed, but
possibly that is why we are so kind. We are not willing to "hurt folks'
feelings" even when they have migrated to another star; and a flower
more or less from the overplus given to men who made the greater choice
will do no harm, tossed to one whose soul may be sitting, like Lazarus,
at their riches' gate.

But of all these fleeting legends made to hold the soul a moment on its
way, and keep it here in fickle permane