uation cannot be surpassed. We
measured the great yews, and several of them were twenty-four or
twenty-five feet in circumference at four feet from the ground. There
were some graves enclosed in railings, and surrounded by evergreens
and rose-trees; and the sentiment of the place was not destroyed by a
few nibbling sheep that cropped the short grass on the graves where
the rude forefathers of the hamlet slept. Can the sepulchral muses
have found their way to so remote a district as this? Have
"afflictions sore" and "vain physicians" obtained a sculptor among the
headstones of this out-of-the-way place? We made a survey of the
inscriptions, as a very sure guide to the state of education among the
peasantry, and are compelled to confess that the schoolmaster had
decidedly gone abroad. Even monuments of some pretension to grandeur,
with full-cheeked cherubs on the sides, and solid stones on the top,
offered no better specimens of spelling and composition that this:--

"Laden with age my years they flew--
The Lord is holy, just, and trew."

And on the slab, over a child of three years old, the following pithy
observation:--

"If life and care could death p_er_vent,
My days would not so soon been spent."

The sculptor, in many instances, (being tired probably of chiselling
the same words over and over,) had attempted an improvement by
altering the arrangement of the lines,--an ingenious device on his
part, and a pleasing puzzle to the spectator:--

"A tender husband and a father
dear, a faithful friend lies
buried hear, he was true and
just in all his ways, he do
deserve this worthey praise."

To the memory of Margaret, wife of John Hall, appeared some lines of a
superior kind, with which we never met elsewhere:--

"You see around me richer neighbours lie
As deep and still in this cold ground as I;
From ease and plenty they were called away--
Could I in lingering sickness wish to stay?
When faith supports the body worn with pain,
To live is nothing but to die is gain."

But as if to show that the muse had made a very flying visit to the
hamlet, and had left the mason, on the next occasion, to his own
unassisted genius, the epitaph on two other members of the same family
runs thus:--

"When in the world we did remain,
Our latter days was grief and pain,
But God above he thought it best
To take _we_ to a place of rest."

Wh