ratifying exceptions to the
general rule, and sometimes a housewife may be met who takes pride and
pleasure in her flower-beds. No doubt it was such a wife that the
lonesome old farmer was speaking of one evening, in a group by a roadside
tavern, as the writer passed along. "My wife loved flowers," he
mournfully said, as his weary eyes seemed to look back into the past,
"and I must go and plant some upon her grave."

* * *

The spirit of independence and isolation extends in many of the old
American families even to the tomb. An interesting monograph might be
written on the private graveyards in some parts of the East. Among the
shade-trees surrounding a house on the busy street, in the orchard behind
the farmer's barn, and again in the depth of the wood, a few rude,
unchiseled headstones, perhaps nearly hidden by tangled brush, reveal the
spot where sleep the forefathers of the plantation. I came across such a
burying-ground not long ago. It was far from the traveled highway, far
from the haunts of living men, among trees and grapevines, and blueberry
bushes. The depression in the soil indicated that the perishable remains
had long ago crumbled to dust, while a large hole burrowed in the earth
showed where a woodchuck made its home among the bones of the forgotten
dead. With reverent hand I cleared the leaves from about the primitive
monuments, and sought for some word or letter that might tell who they
were that lay beneath the silver birches, in the silent New England
forest. But the stones, erect as when set by sorrowing friends perhaps
two hundred years ago, bore neither trace nor mark. There were graves
enough for a household, and likely a household was there. It maybe a
father who had fled from Old England to seek in the wilderness a place
where he might worship God according to the dictates of his heart; a
Pilgrim wife and mother, whose gentle love mellowed and softened the
harshness of frontier life, and sons and daughters, cut off before the
growth of commerce tempted the survivors to the town, or the reports of
new and fertile territories induced them to abandon the rugged but not
ungrateful paternal fields. With gentle step, so not to disturb the
sacred stillness of the scene, I turned from the lonely graves, and I
thought as I walked, that these simple tombs in the bosom of nature well
befitted those who had dared the dangers of wild New England for freedom
from th