PARK AND CCnCTCRY. 
II, and the modern fez. How close to each other 
these gravestones stand! So close that it would be 
impossible to thread one’s way through them; and 
where they are neglected and have toppled over, 
they lie like fallen timber one over another. So 
the dead of different periods must have been buried 
in the same spot, or wedged in wherever soil could 
be found to cover them up. And this accounts for 
the fact so readily noticeable, that while the 
cypresses will scarcely survive if planted upon any 
of the hills or in any of the vacant places about 
Constantinople, they come to giant growths in the 
soil enriched by the innumerable dead of an orien- 
tal city. 
* * * 
The Italian cemeteries give us a very poetic and 
very attractive image of eternal rest. The dead are 
not represented as inanimate beings completely 
insensible to external things. They sleep; and they 
are protected in their sleep, with all love and care. 
Hence mausoleums and marble couches are made 
for them to enjoy upon awakening. And they 
might be expected, from the objects that surround 
them, to arise with a smile of gratitude for all the 
tender care that has been apparently bestowed upon 
them during their temporary effacement. This is 
the undoubted motif prevalent with the Italian de- 
signers of mortuary architecture. Indubitably this 
idea of death is derived from the pagan ancestors of 
the modern Italians; for it seems to be analagous to 
that of the Etruscans, who enclosed in their tombs 
the characteristic belongings of their dead; his arms 
if he were a soldier; the brush or chisel, if he were 
an artist, the implements of his trade if he were an 
artisan. They also added lamps of exquisite de- 
sign, and fruits and wine, in order that he might 
satisfy his wants, if he should awake. The French 
have something of the same materialistic idea of 
death, but they do not express it so pleasingly in 
their mortuary architecture. They are more in- 
tensely dramatic and in their dramatic scenes they 
are more realistic. The effects they produce are 
often shocking to the public sense. An instance 
where the French realism reaches its utmost heigth 
(or depth) is seen in the churchyard of Colmar. 
The citizens of Colmar erected a monument to the 
memory of two Frenchmen shot by the Germans 
when the latter entered the town in the Franco-Prus- 
sian War. Nothing unusual is apparent about the 
monument until the observer stands close to it. Then 
it is observed that one side of the horizontal slab is 
slightly raised, and from the grave beneath, a life- 
size hand of bronze protrudes and grasps the edge 
of the stone, while elsewhere a whole arm is stretched 
out in an endeavor to grasp a real French bayonet 
lying near. The whole has the appearance of a per- 
son buried alive trying to escape from the tomb. It 
is startlingly realistic, and it is no wonder that la- 
dies who have come suddenly and unprepared by 
in view of this tomb have been known to faint from 
terror. 
* * * 
In some parts of China a bamboo grove is conver- 
ted into a cemetery under conditions far from agree- 
able to contemplate. The dead are swathed in mat- 
ting and lashed in an upright position to the stems 
of the bamboo. The birds, insects and the ele- 
ments reduce them in a short time to skeletons. 
The bones are then washed in hot water and classi- 
fied for final burial; that is the male bones are sep- 
arated from the female, for burial in a separate 
giave. But in the greater part of that vast country, 
more reverent- attention is given to sepulture, and 
the cemeteries are very much in evidence. The 
Chinese are, however, an agricultural people and 
are economical of arable land. So that in the al- 
luvial rice lands tor example, so little land can be 
.spared for the dead that the cemeteries are very 
small for the number of graves that have to be ac- 
commodated. To account for the possibility of get- 
ting so many graves in such a small area, it is nec- 
essary to adopt the hypothesis that the bodies are 
buried in an upright position or one on top of ano- 
ther. The tapering mounds, sugar loaf shaped, in 
such cemeteries are very close together and present 
an appearance similar to that of a village of African 
white ants. In some districts a cemetery consists of 
a number of large earthen jars, each of which con- 
tains a dead body in a sitting posture, and is set in 
a niche in the rocky cliffs of the mountains. But 
by far the greater part of China seems to be devided 
between the living and the dead upon the following 
terms: — the living build walled cities in, or other- 
wise occupy the level ground; the dead are buried 
on the hills. There are no fences or other limita- 
tions to these hill cemeteries. No corpse is allowed 
to be buried within the walls of a Chinese city. 
The modes of sepulture varies from the “horse-shoe 
grave,” or vault built into the hillside with the outer 
end formed like a horse-shoe, down to the shallow 
graves into which the poor put their dead; marked 
by a small tablet of wood or stone. The Chinese 
graveyard is not generally so disreputable as those 
of Persia or Turkey, and the Chinaman as a rule 
pays great respect to the dead. Yet the cemeteries 
are often out of repair and even the horse-shoe 
graves are sometimes so dilapidated as to expose to 
the passers by the crumbling coffin and skeleton 
within. 
L. Viajero. 
