XI 
I ANY foreign writers have praised 
our rural cemeteries without 
reserve. The student of social 
conditions says that they express 
genuine poetic feeling as well as wise sani- 
tary ideas, and the lover of art and Nature 
finds them our most characteristic achieve- 
ments in the art of gardening. Their size, 
their park -like arrangement, their remoteness 
from centres of population, and the neatness 
with which they are kept, have often been 
described as worthy of imitation in Euro- 
pean countries. 
Certainly, as contrasted with the walled- 
in, crowded, dreary, sun-baked, weed-grown 
cemeteries one most often finds in Europe, 
ours deserve great praise. But they are not 
what they ought to be. Excellent in in- 
tention, they are too often bad in execu- 
tion. No expenditure of money or pains is 
shunned, but grievous mistakes are made in 
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