THE CHURCHYARD. 
2S9 
standing apart, with broad fields spreading on all sides, but no 
graves at band. Some distance beyond, perhaps, you will come 
to a square enclosure, opening into the highway, and this is the 
cemetery of the congregation. Small family buiying-grounds, 
about the fields, are very common ; sometimes it is a i-etired spot, 
neatly enclosed, or it may he only a row of graves in one comer 
of the meadow, or orchard. Walking in the fields a while since, 
we were obliged to climb a stone wall, and on jumping down into 
the adjoining meadow, we found we had alighted on a grave ; there 
were several others lying around near the fence, an unhewm stone 
at the head and foot of each humble hillock. This custom of 
burying on the farms had its origin, no doubt, in the peculiar cir- 
cumstances of the early population, thinly scattered over a wide 
country, and separated by distance and had roads from any place 
of pubhc worsliip. In this way the custom of making tlie graves 
of a famil)' upon the homestead gradually found favor among the 
people, and they learned to look upon it as a melancholy gratifi- 
cation to make the tombs of the departed members of a family 
near the dwelling of the living. The increase of the population, 
and the improvement of the roads on one hand, with the changes 
of property, and the greater number of \dllages on the other, are 
now bringing about another state of things. Public cemeteries 
for parishes, or whole communities, are becoming common, while 
tlie isolated burial-places about the farms are more rare than they 
used to be. 
The few church-yards found among us are usually seen in the 
older parishes ; places of worship, recently built, very rarely have 
a yard attached to them. The narrow, crowded, abandoned 
church-yards, still seen in the heart of our older towns, Ijave be- 
13 
