198 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 



with the most elaborate care it was liable to miss fire. Smiling should especially be 

 avoided. What he might honestly consider a shining success was likely to strike 

 me in a very different light. I said I liked to see a skeleton cheerful, even decor- 

 ously playful, but I did not think smiling was a skeleton's best hold. 



"Yes, friend," said the poor skeleton, "the facts are just as I have given them to 

 you. Two of these old graveyards — the one that I resided in and one further along 

 — hav^ been deliberately neglected by our descendants of to-day until there is no 

 occupying them any longer. Aside from the osteological discomfort of it^-and that 

 is no light matter this rainy weather — the present state of things is ruinous to 

 property. We have got to move or be content to see our effects wasted away and 

 utterly destroyed. Now, you will hardly believe it, but it is true, nevertheless, 

 that there isn't a single coffin in good repair among all my acquaintance — now that 

 is an absolute fact. I do not refer to low people who come in a pine box mounted 

 on an express wagon, but I am talking about your high-toned, silver mounted 

 burial-case, your monumental sort, that travel under black plumes at the head of a 

 procession and have choice of cemetery lots — I mean folks like the Jarvises, and 

 the Bledsoes and Burlings, and such. They are all about ruined. The most 

 substantial people in our set, they were. And now look at them — utterly used up 

 and poverty-stricken. One of the Bledsoes actually traded his monument to a late 

 bar-keeper for some fresh shavings to put under his head. I tell you it speaks 

 volumes, for there is nothing a corpse takes so much pride in as his monument. He 

 loves to read the inscription. He comes after awhile to believe what it says him- 

 self, and then you may see him sitting on the fence night after night enjoying it. 

 Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world of good after he is dead, 

 especially if he had hard luck while he was alive. I wish they were used more. 

 Now, I don't complain, but confidentially I do think it was a little shabby in my 

 descendants to give me nothing but this old slab of a gravestone — and all the more 

 that there isn't a compliment on it. It used to have 



'gone to his just reward' 



on it, and I was proud when I first saw it, but by-and-by I noticed that whenever 

 an old friend of mine came along he would hook his chin on the railing and pull a 



