204 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES. 



weeping ash is a terribly starched mourner, and 

 should be banished as an impertinence. Ah 1 curious 

 and rare exotics, I should say, have no place there ; 

 unless, like the yew or the European cypress, they 

 bear some story of association which chimes evenly 

 with the solemn shadows around. The darker ever- 

 greens generally, are most fitting; and there is a 

 variety of the Norway spruce, with long, pendulous 

 arms, that is one of the stateliest and comeliest and 

 friendliest of mourners it is possible to imagine. If 

 the Mediterranean cypress would but withstand the 

 rigor of our season, its dark plumes, leading up on 

 either side to the gateway of a tomb, would make a 

 standing funereal hymn. 



Near to Savannah, in Georgia, and upon one of 

 the creeks making into the irregular shores there- 

 about, is a cemetery called, if I remember rightly, 

 Buena Ventura. In old times, any visitor at the Pulaski 

 used to find his way there, and was richly repaid for 

 the visit. There was no proper "keeping" to the 

 grounds. You passed in under a lumbering old gate- 

 way of unhewn timber ; the paths were not carefully 

 tended ; there was much of rampant and almost in- 

 decorous undergrowth ; the tombs were mossy, and 

 the graves, many of them, sunken ; but great live- 

 oaks over-reached your path, and from their gnarled 

 limbs hung swaying pennants of that weird gray 



