Was father, mother, husband, the needed title? Alas, all were easily supplied, and then followed the inevitable “from the grave.”
There was one with a harsh creditor accent, before which light-hearted readers could hardly help shrinking a little:—
“Death is a debt to Nature due,
I’ve paid it now, and so must you.”
But there was another, carved more than once, which might well cause a deeper shudder. It ran:—
“Beneath this stone Death’s prisoner lies,
Ye stone shall move, ye prisoner rise,
When Jesus, with Almighty word,
Calls his dead Saints to meet their Lord.”
“Dreadful theology, don’t you think?” Mr. Hadley said, turning with a little shiver to the girls, and their grandfather added his assent to theirs with emphasis. “Yes, Jesus hasn’t got any dead saints. They or’ to have remembered what He said Himself, that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”
But by far the greater number of these ancient headstones were marked with texts of scripture, and however mirth might be provoked by sentiment or phrase from other sources, the simple dignity of the book of books always brought back seriousness and reminded on what word the hearts of men had leaned, through the long generations, to endure the old, old sorrow of death. The faith of the fathers, not their fashions, was the thought which one must bear away in the end from such a spot.
They had paused longest by the graves of Ruel Saxon’s people, and again as they left the place he lingered for a moment by the low gray line of stones. “They were God-fearing men and women, all of them,” he said, with tender reverence in his voice; then, lifting his face, he added, with inexpressible pride and solemnity:—
“My boast is not that I deduce my birth
From loins enthroned, and rulers of the earth,
But higher far my proud pretensions rise—
The son of parents passed into the skies.”
That was the last word spoken before they let down the bars in the old stone wall and made their way back to their horses. Possibly the young man, who was so anxious to establish his family record, may have caught, at that moment, a new thought of ancestral honors.