PARK AND CEMETERY, 
23 
The annual meeting of the Lowell Cemetery Association, 
Lowell, Masi., showed a considerable falling off in the receipts 
as compared with last year. Among the receipts were: Sale of 
lots, $2,580.81; care of lots, $4,102.07; general work, I472. 03; 
greenhouse, $102.58. In the expenditures, pay roll and salaries 
amounted to $8,580.15. The total amount credited to the per- 
petual care fund was .182,211.76; and to the Reserve Fund, $16,- 
49612. The treasurer in his report speaks as follows on per- 
petual care: “Attention has been called repeatedly to this sub- 
ject for the reason that so many people are found who will not 
protect themselves while they may. It has been pointed out 
that a perpetual care fund might be ample while earning 4 per- 
cent. That is, a lot is funded with a deposit of $100. Its an- 
nual earning at present is I4 and the superintendent’s charge 
for annual care is $4. It is obvious that the fund provides for 
the annual care charge — nothing more. There is no margin to 
provide for accidental and unforeseen happenings. It is obvi- 
ous that such a fun-J is deposited under very close calculations. 
Now let us suppose that our perpetual cai-e funds shall earn less 
than 4 per cent. Suppose the earning rate is reduced to 3 or 2 >/ 4 . 
per cent, how then does the $100 deposit provide for the future? 
Understand that such contingency is very apt to occur in the fu- 
ture. As many times before, I urge that lot owners increase 
their funds where deficient, and that those intending to provide 
perpetual care by will or otherwise, will carefully consider these 
points. This a matter which, if done at all, should be done 
right. These words are not uttered in the corporation’s inter- 
est but for the good and protection of the lot owner.” 
The huge floral wreath which is annually made up at Wind- 
sor Castle has been placed before a plain tablet on the outer 
wall of ( 21^600 Anne’s church, Soho, London. Queen Victoria 
never forgets the day that Theodore, king of Corsica, died. For 
many years it was not known who sent the floral offering to his 
memory, and even to day it is not known why Britain’s cjueen 
chooses to honor the memory of a man w’ho was not of royal 
blood, and who died the day after being released from prison, 
Horace Walpole wrote the epitaph set up in the churchyard, 
which is now a common playground for the dirty children of the 
neighborhood, once an artistocratic quarter. The lettering on 
the stone, which was fast growing dim, has just been recut. It 
reads: 
“The grave, great teacher, to a level brings 
Heroes and beggars, galley slaves and kings; 
But Theodore the moral lesson learned ere dead. 
Fate poured its lesson on his living head 
Bestowed a kingdom and denied him bread.” 
The king, who was a German, named Theodore Anthony 
Neuhoff, had one son, a Col. Frederick, who shot himself at the 
gate of Westminster Abbey in 1797. He left one son; whom he 
refused to recognize, but who assumed the name and founded 
one of the great jute factories at Dundee, and the king’s grand- 
son, who is reckoned to be one of the wealthiest manufacturers 
in Scotland, lives in a magnificent place near Tayport, in Fife. 
There is a sermon of wonderful suggestiveness in the follow- 
ing in connection with General Gordon’s dilapidated garden at 
Khartoum, witten by Mr. G. W. Steevens in the London Math 
In this garden you somehow came to know Gordon, the man, 
not the myth, and to feel near to him. Here was an English- 
man doing his duty, alone, and at the instant peril of his life; 
yet still he loved his garden. The garden was a yet more pathe- 
tic ruin than the palace. The palace accepted its doom mutely; 
the garden strove against it. Untrimmed, unwatered, the oranges 
and citrons still struggled to bear their little hard green knobs, 
as if they had been full ripe fruits. The pomegranates put out 
their vermilion star flowers, but the fruit was small and woody 
and juiceless. The figs bore better, but they, too, were small 
and without vigor. Rankly overgrown with dhurra, a vine still 
trained over a low roof its dwarfed leaves and limp tendrils, but 
yielded not a sign of grapes. It was all green, and so far vivid 
and refreshing after Omdurman. But it was the green of nature, 
not of cultivation; leaves grew large and fruit grew small and 
dwindled away. Reluctantly, despairingly, Gordon’s garden w'as 
dropping back to wilderness. And in the middle of the defeated 
fruit trees grew rankly the hateful Sudan apple, the poisonous 
herald of desolation. 
LEGAL. 
DOES NOT APPLY TO CEMETERY ASSOCIATIONS. 
The Supreme court of Ohio holds, in the case of Carter 
against the City of Zanesville, that section 3764 of the revised 
statutes of that state, prescribing a penalty against persons, etc., 
having unlawful possession of the body of a deceased person, is 
not directed against cemetery associations or their trustees; nor 
does It relate to the remains of persons long buried and decom- 
posed. 
* * * 
HOLDS CITY LIABLE. 
There are two or three points of more or less interest in the 
decision recently rendered by the supreme court of Minnesota 
in the case of Sacks against the City of Minneapolis and others. 
First of all, the court assumes chat the special act of 1891 (Chap. 
129), authorizing the City of Minneapolis to vacate part of the 
Maple Hill Cemetery, etc., is unconstitutional, as the legislature 
was prohibited from enacting special laws for the purpose of 
laying out, opening or altering highways. But it says that the 
charter of the City of Minneapolis authorizes it to condemn land 
for street and highway purposes, though it also provides that 
such authority shall not be construed as permitting the con- 
demnation of any ground of any cemetery or burial place occu- 
pied for such purpose without the consent of the owner of such 
ground. Nevertheless, the City did, without the knowledge or 
consent of the plaintiff take and condemn lor street purposes, 
his burial lot in Maple Hill Cemetery, wherein were interred 
four of his children and removed their bodies therefrom and 
buried them in one grave in said cemetery. Under these circum- 
stances, the supreme court of Minnesota holds that the con- 
demnation proceedings instituted by the City were within the 
general scope of its corporate power, as prescribed by its charter 
but that, as it did not obtain the consent of the owner of this lot 
in question, for such purpose, its acts were unauthorized and 
tortious, and hence it was liable to the plaintiff in 'damages 
therefor, as well as that the liability of another of the defendants 
was undoubted, he having assisted and taken part with and in 
behalf of the City in these tortious acts. 
* * -X- 
The following decision has been recently rendered in the 
Arkansas Courts. Chancellor Tliomas B. Martin has rendered 
a decree in a case in which the plaintiff sought an injunction to 
restrain the defendants from plowing over or otherwise dese- 
crating a certain tract of land dedicated over fifty years ago as a 
burial lot, and wherein rests all that is mortal of the plaintiff’s 
first husband and other relatives and citizens of the vicinity. The 
court decrees that the defendants be “perpetually enjoined 
from cultivating over said graveyard tracts or removing or tear- 
ing down or interfering with the stones or other memorials now 
on or about the graves therein, or which may hereafter be placed 
therein to mark said graves, and they are enjoined from destroy- 
ing the mounds and other indications of graves therein, and they 
are enjoined from interfering with or trespassing upon said 
graveyard tracts or breaking, tearing down, or in any way inter- 
fering with the fence that may hereafter be placed around said 
graveyard tracts.” The plaintiff and those interested are given 
ingress to and egress from the graveyard over the defendant's 
property under certain restrictions. 
