His grave is beside that of his wife, and daughter (Mrs. Bache), in the northwest corner of the yard. "I wish," he said in his will, "to be buried by the side of my wife, if it may be, and that a marble stone be made by Chambers, six feet long, four feet wide, plain, with only a small molding round the upper edge, and this inscription:
"Benjamin
and Deborah
Franklin.
His wishes were complied with. The date on the stone is 1790. * In the same inclosure General Mercer, who was killed at Princeton, was first buried; also Major-general Charles Lee, whose aversion to burial with Dissenters has been noticed. Standing amid its graves, and overshadowed by the venerable church, the American feels that he is upon consecrated ground indeed—consecrated by something holier than the voice of man setting it apart as a resting-place for the dead.
Here, wide open, is a broad page of our national history; let us sit down this still Sabbath afternoon and peruse a portion of it preparatory to a ramble on the morrow.
On the beautiful banks of the Delaware **—the Indian's Mack-er-isk-iskan—dwelt for ages the powerful tribes of the Lenni Lenapes ***—the Original People. They claimed the broad land from the Hudson to the Poto-
* As early as 1727, when Franklin was only twenty-two years of age, he wrote the following epitaph for himself:
The Body of
Benjamin Franklin,
Printer,
Like the cover of an old Book.
Its contents torn out
(And stripped of its lettering and gilding),
Lies here, food for worms.
But the work shall not be lost,
For it will (as he believed) appear once more
In a new and more elegant edition,
Revised and corrected by
The Author.