snug little railed-iu garden, or in an Egyptian
vaulted tomb. You go and take your family to
see the place now and then on a Sunday, and if
you like, you can have a key to the garden railing
if you wish to plant everlasting flowers or
other sentimentalities.

Let me take three representative cities, and
describe the cemeteries in each of them. I will
select New York, Philadelphia, and Savannah;
the first the commercial capital of America, the
second the Quaker city, the third a flourishing
city of Georgia, with a population of sixteen
thousand whites and twelve thousand blacks.

Let me begin with Greenwood Cemetery, at
New York, the most fashionable of all the
burying-places in that bustling city. It is
situated in the south part of Brooklyn,
about three miles from the New York and
Brooklyn Ferries. This cemetery was
incorporated in eighteen hundred and thirty-eight,
and contains two hundred and forty-two acres
of land, about one-half of which is covered with
wood of a natural growth. The admittance is
free, except on Sundays, when only the owners
of lots or the possessors of vaults are supposed
to obtain admittance; but I generally found
that twenty-five cents would go a great way
towards obtaining you an entrance.

You reach the cemetery through dusty and
rather desolate roads, past countless villas, raw
gardens, new lots, new shops, and new cottages,
all very new things. The neighbourhood here
is rather famous for low fevers, and a more
apt place for Death's garden could scarcely
have been chosen. The ground was swampy,
unused, therefore unwholesome and cheap.
The ground undulates and runs up and down
hills, from the top of which you have fine
views of the sea, therefore it attracts visitors;
who make a park and promenade of it, and go
home with better relish to their green turtle soup
and their other "fixings." The ground, too, was
naturally wooded, and boasted of a small lake,
that would do for inconsolable weeping-willows
and rippling little fountains; "above all," said
the proprietor, "it is not too far from New York
city." It is a pleasure to think of resting in
such a pretty place as Greenwood Cemetery.

But let me enter it properly. I pass under a
great prosaic Greek gateway, after diplomacy with
the porter. I descended to this gateway by a
long flight of steps from the roadway above. I
feel as if I were in a deserted zoological garden,
or a parvenu's park, in which the trees were
still sapling and parvenu too. Melancholy
sallow people walk about in groups; nankeen-
coloured ladies, over-dressed, in hideous caricature
crinoline and strange French bonnets
arching up over their heads—ladies who wear a
look of true American contempt for the sturdier
sex, and who wring service from men by whom
it would be only too readily paid. The men
carry ivory-knobbed canes of extreme size, and
wear ill-fitting creasy black clothes; their hats
are generally of the wide-awake species, which
gives them a rustic and mechanic air to my
prejudiced eye. The children are stiff little
creatures, prematurely old and sallow, too self-
confident and bold to please me, and dressed rather
in the French manner.

A stranger would soon lose himself in two
hundred and odd acres of winding walks, lawns,
flower-beds, grassy hills, and iron paled gardens
were it not for notices everywhere stuck up,
indicating the direction of "the tour," or chief
circuit, which leads you by all the principal
tombs, graves, and points of view.

Some people have a horror of damp graves;
others of city churchyards; others of deep-sea
interment; others of lying unburied altogether
on desert island or foreign shore; but there are
few who would not, if they could choose, choose
such a peaceful place as Greenwood Cemetery,
where the great companionship of dead gives a
sense of fellowship, sad but not painful. There
is no jarring noise of life: no grind of wheel,
recalling the pain and travail of existence;
not even the murmur of the distant sea, or
the low breathing of the distant city; its roar
being softened here to a whisper. Sea and
city are both too far away. The grog-shop, the
railway station, the euker-table, Lime-street—
all that troubled these sleepers when alive—are
put away from them by Death, as the nurse
puts away the toys from a fractious child.

Even the tomb has its conceits, its prides, and
vanities. Look at these great Egyptian
mausoleums, complete houses; the door sometimes
half ajar, sometimes hermetically sealed, with
now and then a fringe of everlasting flowers, an
American eagle, or trite patriotism and sentiment
that ape true feeling.

Death, too, can be vulgar. Look at this
hideous batch of iron tombstones of the Twigg
family, girt in with a rail of iron balls and spikes.
Look, too, at the vulgar Twigg flower-beds—
the great obtrusive sun-flowers, and big, staring,
rhubarb-coloured dahlias. Presently I come to
something worse than even the Twigg obelisk;
a frightful statue of a New York pilot, carved
in stone, in the costume in which he lived. The
poor creature, Man, struggling to win fame,
makes his last great effort in the churchyard,
carving his name and epitaph, and lying down
with it over him, like a thick stone blanket, to
keep out the cold; then comes Time, the great
enemy, and with an impatient sneer, rubs out
the record, and the sleeper is henceforth
forgotten, except by his good deeds, which still
blossom over his dust, and bear fruit, and scatter
their seed of gratitude and memory.

I sometimes fancy myself in a tea-garden
labyrinth, as I occasionally lose my way and
meet bands of laughing people who have lost
their way also, and are seeking help from one of
those curators with white wands, who wander
about the death gardens like insane showmen,
who have had their shows stolen. Now I am,
hushed and soothed into reverence by a train
of mourners, with a clergyman at their head,
entering one of the little gardens on that hill
yonder—the rosiest of them, too—and a curator
whispers to me that that is the funeral of
                EPHRAIM PEPPERNET,