110 



CHURCH GARDENS AND CEMETERIES. 



being done exactly as a natty man would pack together 

 turves or Mushroom- spawn bricks. This is the fosse com- 

 mune, or grave of the humbler class of people, who cannot 

 afford to pay for the ground. I am not certain what be- 

 comes of the remains of these poor people after the lapse 

 of a short time, but by some means or other the ground is 

 soon prepared for another crop. On this principle, " the 

 rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep " but a very short time 

 in their last bed, and there is a very wide difference indeed 

 between " sickle and crown " in Pere la Chaise. 



One day, when in the Cemetery of Mont Parnasse, I 

 saw them making a new road, the bottom being made with 

 broken headstones, many of them bearing the date of 1860 

 and thereabouts. These had been placed on ground that 

 had not been paid for in perpetuity, and were consequently 



Fig. 43. 



The Catacombs. 



grubbed up when, as before described, they wanted to fill 

 the trenches a second time. Sir Charles Lyell tells us about 

 a graveyard being undermined by the sea on the eastern 

 coast, and a stone inscribed to " perpetuate " the memory 

 of somebody being knocked about by the waves on the 

 beach — but I never fully knew what a poor, transient, weedy 

 kind of grass is the flesh of the lords of creation till I be- 

 came acquainted with Parisian cemeteries. A cutting 

 thirteen or fourteen feet wide, with the earth thrown up in 

 high banks at each side, a priest standing at one part near 



