s, crosses and urns, craning one
above another, is as directly opposed to the restfulness of the village
churchyard with its serene outspreading yews as midday Fleet Street to a
Sabbath evening amidst the Sussex hills. This cemetery is, indeed, a
veritable tumult of tombs.

Another thing that presently comes painfully home to one is the lack of
individuality among all these dead. Not a necessary lack of
individuality so much as a deliberate avoidance of it. As one wanders
along the steep, narrow pathways one is more and more profoundly
impressed by the wholesale flavour of the mourning, the stereotyping of
the monuments. The place is too modern for _memento mori_ and the
hour-glass and the skull. Instead, Slap & Dash, that excellent firm of
monumental masons, everywhere crave to be remembered. Truly, the firm of
Slap & Dash have much to answer for among these graves, and they do not
seem to be ashamed of it.

From one elevated point in this cemetery one can count more than a
hundred urns, getting at last weary and confused with the receding
multitude. The urn is not dissimilar to the domestic mantel ornament,
and always a stony piece of textile fabric is feigned to be thrown over
its shoulder. At times it is wreathed in stony flowers. The only variety
is in the form. Sometimes your urn is broad and squat, a Silenus among
urns; sometimes fragile and high-shouldered, like a slender old maid;
here an "out-size" in urns stalwart and strong, and there a dwarf
peeping quaintly from its wrapping. The obelisks, too, run through a
long scale of size and refinement. But the curious man finds no hidden
connection between the carriage of the monument and the character of the
dead. Messrs. Slap & Dash apparently take the urn or obelisk that comes
readiest to hand. One wonders dimly why mourners have this overwhelming
proclivity for Messrs. Slap & Dash and their obelisk and urn.

The reason why the firm produces these articles may be guessed at. They
are probably easy to make, and require scarcely any skill. The
contemplative man has a dim vision of a grimy shed in a back street,
where a human being passes dismally through life the while he chips out
an unending succession of these cheap urns and obelisks for his
employers' retailing. But the question why numberless people will
profane the memory of their departed by these public advertisements of
Slap & Dash, and their evil trade, is a more difficult problem. For
surely nothing c