“She faltered by the wayside,
And the angels took her home.”
But this, which came next, was not so felicitous:—
“God took him to His Heavenly home,
No more this weary world to roam.”
This, to a babe of six months, certainly indicated a paucity of rhymes on the part of the composer, and Mr. Hadley pointed in triumph to a year marked on the little gray slab which plainly antedated his ancestor.
But the stone which by the consent of all was pronounced the most unique was inscribed to Keziah, a “beloved wife who put on immortality” at the age of thirty-five. Below the name and date was carved an emblem suggestive of a chrysalis, with the words, “Keziah as she was;” and under this appeared the head of a cherub, with the wings of a butterfly sprouting from its swollen cheeks, and the words, “Keziah as she is.”
Stella hovered around this for some time in convulsed admiration. “I’m so glad there were artists as well as poets in those days,” she said; and then she added, with a levity she could not repress, “it reminds one for all the world of the advertisements, ‘Before and after taking.’”
There was another erected to the memory of a wife which called forth almost as much admiration. The virtues of the deceased were set forth with unusual fulness, and the record of her long services to society, the church, and her family, ended with the words, “She lived with her husband sixty years, and died in the hope of a better life.”
Even Deacon Saxon chuckled over this, and then added, “I don’t b’lieve my sister Katharine ever heard of that, or she’d have thrown it up to me before this.”
It was queer what oddities of thought and expression had got themselves cut in some of these stones, and there were commonplaces which occurred over and over:—
“Friends nor physicians could not save
This loving ——”