of competence enabled me to claim as
my wife, has long been reconciled to her home
in Poland.

KENSAL GREEN.

IN a novel by M. Paul de Kock, it is stated
that the principal promenades of the English
people take place in cemeteries, which are
congenial places of resort to a nation suffering from
the spleen. So far as I, an unit in the nation,
am concerned, the French author's assertion is to
some extent correct. I do not exactly know
what the spleen is, and consequently I may be
suffering from it unconsciously; but, whatever
may be the motive power, I have a taste for
wandering in churchyards, and looking at those
houses which the gravemaker builds, and which
"last till doomsday." Both in Germany and in
England, there is a certain due sense of solemnity
about the churchyard; walking in them, one
feels with the man of Uz, that "there the wicked
cease from troubling, and there the weary be at
rest. There the prisoners rest together; they
hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small
and great are there, and the servant is free from
his master." They are essentially places for
meditation and reflection, and as an antidote
against an overweening sense of worldliness, I
would back an afternoon spent in one of certain
churchyards which I know—say, haphazard,
Hendon, Stoke-Pogis, Stratford-on-Avon—against
most of the trenchant homilies I have listened
to. As old Thoresby the antiquarian says,
"One serious walk over a churchyard might
make a man mortified to the world to consider
how many he treads upon who once lived in
fashion and repute, but are now quite forgot.
Imagine you saw your bones tumbled out of
your graves as they are like shortly to be, and
men handling your skulls, and inquiring, 'Whose
is this?' Tell me of what account will the world
be then?"

Of the English Cemetery, however, I knew
nothing, until, on a blazing July afternoon, I set
out for Kensal Green.

Just as a town has its suburbs, an army its
pioneers, and a village its outskirts, so the great
cemetery of Kensal Green (dedicated appropriately
enough to All Souls) makes its vicinity
felt some time before it is actually in sight.
Once past the turnpike on the road, though yet
a good half-mile from the nearest entrance, you
are struck with certain signs and tokens which
speak significantly of the region. The building
to the right, just by the turn in the road, is an
establishment for the sale of tombstones, and
that monotonous grinding sound, which so grates
on the ear, is occasioned by the polishing or the
smoothing of the surface of a huge slab destined to
be sacred to the memory of some person unknown,
who is not impossibly at this moment alive and
well. As you trudge along, and before you have
done speculating how often the muddy canal to
our left has been compared to the Styx, and
whether a certain yard or field, also on the left,
has been made a receptacle for carts and
waggons which have departed this life, solely
because of its locality, and, if not, why so many
broken-up vehicles are there congregated, you
come to more tombstone establishments.
Statuary and mason are inscribed after the dealers'
names on the facade, but this is a mere
euphuistic fencing with the subject. The only
statuary sold is for the graveyard; the only
masonry dealt in, is for the crypt or mausoleum.
Past the snug-looking Plough Inn, at the old-
fashioned entrance to which stands an empty
hearse, and at the windows whereof several
professional gentlemen, arrayed in solemn black, are
indulging in bibulous refreshment; past an
elaborate monument on which mortuary emblems
are crowded in great profusion—an hour-glass
surmounting two dead lions, and a couple of
weeping females supporting an affecting tablet,
whereon a trade advertisement is inscribed;
past several shops where even the pictorial
literature assumes a mournful character, the
nearest approach to humour being a "ladder of
matrimony," which commences with "hope," and
ends in "despair," such end being typified by the
cheerful emblem of a foundering ship; past the
shop window full of white and yellow
immortelles, which look like so many wedding-rings
from the fingers of departed Brobdingnagians;
and, duly armed with a courteous letter from the
secretary of the company, I present myself
through the arched entrance to the cemetery.

Having conferred with the pleasant-looking
rubicund gatekeeper, an evidently cheerful
philosopher, who supplies me with an Illustrated Guide
to Kensal Green Cemetery, and requests me to
wait until the clerk is disengaged, I stroll into
the garden and sit down. A Frenchman, with wife
and family, are chattering on the adjoining seat,
eating bon-bons, and gazing round the cemetery
with a critical air, as comparing it with cemeteries
of their own land. It is some time before I see
any other visitors, and it may be worth stating
that during the whole time I was in the cemetery
(some hours), I met with only one person in
mourning: a widow, whose scarlet petticoat I
may be excused for mentioning, contrasted
gracefully with her looped-up black dress, making
a tasteful setting to a remarkably neat pair of
feet. Three or four damsels from the neighbourhood,
a tender couple apparently on the first
round of the ladder of matrimony aforesaid, a
couple of carriages with provincial occupants,
and one or two people who were selecting
ground, were, besides the gardeners and
servants employed by the company, my only fellow
explorers on the day I devoted to the city of the
dead. "The clerk" was not, as I had hastily
concluded, a clerk of the works, a sort of overseer
who looked after the persons employed,
and kept the books of the company, but the
service ecclesiastical official who reads the
responses, and says Amen after the clergyman.
His engagement was of course a funeral, or,
as he termed it, when politely apologising
for having kept me waiting, "an interment."
Both these words mean the same thing, of course,