CHANGE IN GRAVESTONES 211 



half buried in the soil, of an exceptional hardness, 

 marking the spot where lieth one who departed this 

 life in the seventeenth or early in the eighteenth century. 

 There are many old stones, it is true, with nothing 

 legible on them, but one does not know how old they 

 are. It is not that these gravestones are beautiful 

 only because they are old, and have had their hard 

 surface softened and embroidered with green moss and 

 lichen of many shades, from pale-grey to orange and 

 red and brown. The form of the stone, the stone- 

 cutter's work, was beautiful before Nature began to 

 work on it with her sunshine, her rain, her invisible 

 seed. I cannot think why this old fashion, or rather, 

 let us say, this tender, sacred custom, of marking the 

 last resting-place of the dead with a memorial satisfying 

 to the aesthetic sense, should have gone or- died out. 

 The gravestones used at the present time are, as a rule, 

 twice as big as the old ones, and are perfectly plain 

 immense stone slabs, inscribed with big, fat, black 

 letters differing in size, the whole inscription curiously 

 resembling the local auctioneer's bills to be seen pasted 

 up on barn-doors, fences, and other suitable places. 

 So big, and hard, and bold, and ugly I try not to 

 see them ! 



Look from these at the old stone which the earth- 

 worms have been busy trying to bury for a century, 

 until the lower half of the inscription is under 

 ground ; the stone which the lichen has embossed 

 and richly coloured; round which the grass grows so 



