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THE COUNTRY GRAVEYARD 
By CHARLES M. SKINNER 
C OUNTRY graveyards have, and should 
have, their own charm, distinct from the 
attractions of a city or suburban cemetery. 
This way of putting it may cause a smile. 
Charm? Attraction? And why not? No 
bit of earth is so consecrate, none should be 
more beautiful. We should find here an har¬ 
monious expression of that sanctity with 
which we invest the dead. We should find 
here a softening of all that suggests death 
itself. We should rob death of the terror 
with which it continues to possess some 
minds, and show that its resting place is 
gentleness, order, sweetness ; that when we 
die, as all before us have done, we shall only 
give back to the earth what we have bor¬ 
rowed for these vestments, and let it change 
to visual loveliness in green and flowers. 
It is, in one way, an advantage to the 
country cemetery that it is so usually neg¬ 
lected. The farmer is a busy man, he is 
in his fields from dawn till dark, and he has 
to struggle to support the living. He may 
mourn his dead, but he has little time to 
give to them. And it is, therefore, a mis¬ 
take made by many who design rural ceme¬ 
teries that they presuppose the art and care 
in their maintenance which are given to the 
burial places controlled by city corporations 
and parcelled among wealthy families or 
families of leisure, who in an absence of 
urgent employment will give not a little of 
their time to preserving and beautifying 
these spots. 
Neglect is good in that the return to 
nature is accomplished more easily, and a 
certain sort of care is unwise in that it is 
the wrong care. There is, for example, a 
strange prejudice in the countryman’s mind 
against shade in his cemetery. It may be 
that he grudges the space for trees and 
shrubbery that should be given, he thinks, 
to graves, but it is more likely that he has 
a disaffection for what is abundant, and 
therefore, in his eyes, cheap. Trees cover 
his hills and edge his rivers; why, then, 
should they be planted in his cemetery ? 
He ordains that they shall not; and when, 
from blown maple keys or other seeds, a 
few saplings root and rise in the hallowed 
ground, he lays on them with an axe and 
exposes the turf to the glare of the sun once 
more. Or, is it possible that he is still 
superstitious, and fears that ghosts may 
haunt the gloom of a grove? Anyway, it is 
a fact that our rural burial-places are usually 
“ protected ” against trees, and that until 
laws to that effect are reversed, or pass by 
common consent into the limbo whereto 
most laws in this law-ridden land are con¬ 
signed, there can be no effective beginning 
of reform. 
A moderate shade, then, is one desidera¬ 
tum ; paths that shall either be paths (not 
roads),or shall be grassy hollows, are another; 
and especially should the monuments and 
garnishings fit the environment. And here is 
the essential difference in treatment between 
the town and the country cemetery. Wealth 
will have its fling, even in the graveyard. 
Woodlawn, with its Greek temples, its Ma¬ 
hometan mosques, its Gothic chapels, its 
nondescripts with colored windows, is fan¬ 
tastic, bizarre ; and the rustic cemetery should 
contain just those things which Woodlawn 
does not. Showy structures belong to towns, 
because the towns are shows. Simplicity 
and harmony with nature are proper to the 
rustic setting. 
Yet this simplicity need not preclude art. 
The cemetery, like the garden, should have 
a focus of plan, or form, or color. If it con¬ 
tains one imposing monument, that should 
stand, not in a corner, or a hollow, or in 
mean relations, but should dominate the 
inclosure and be the key of the restricted 
landscape. This does not imply that it 
should fill the geographical center of the 
ground, but should be the most assertive 
figure in it; that the paths and plots should, 
without seeming consciousness in the ar¬ 
rangement, or any effect of mapping, radiate 
from it; that ungainly or trifling construc¬ 
tions should not crowd it. Nor does it fol¬ 
low that the structural center should be a 
monument: it might be a chapel; it might be 
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