“Here lies the body of Mr. Stephen Kelsey, who
died April 2, 1745, in ye 71 year of his age
as you are so was we
as we are you must be”

The peculiarities of this inscription were doubtless the stone-cutter’s; and peradventure it was in the following way that the rhymes—already centuries old in 1745 when Stephen Kelsey died—came to be upon his headstone.

The carver of the memorial was undeniably a neighbor and fellow-husbandman to the children of Mr. Stephen Kelsey. Money-earning opportunities were narrow and silver hard to come by in the pioneering of the Litchfield Hills, and only after scrupulous saving had the Kelsey family the cost of the headstone at last in hand. It was then that they met to consider an epitaph.

Their neighbor bespoken to work the stone was at the meeting, and to open the way and clear his memory he scratched the date of death upon a tablet or shingle his own hand had riven.

“Friend Stephen’s death,” he began, “calleth to mind a verse often sculptured in the old church-yard in Leicestershire, a verse satisfying the soul with the vanity of this life, and turning our eyes to the call from God which is to come. It toucheth not the vexations of the world which it were vain to deny are ever present. You carry it in your memory mayhap, Mistress Remembrance?” the stone-master interrupting himself asked, suddenly appealing to a sister of Master Kelsey.

Mistress Remembrance, an elderly spinster whose lover having in their youth taken the great journey to New York, and crossed the Devil’s Stepping-Stones—which before the memory of man some netherworld force laid an entry of Manhattan Island—had never again returned to the Litchfield Hills—Mistress Remembrance recalled the verses, and also her brother, Master Stephen’s, sonorous repetition of them.

In this way it came about that the mourning family determined they should be engraven. And there the lines stand to-day in the hills’ beautiful air—far more than a century since the hour when Mistress Remembrance and the stone-cutter joined the celestial choir in which Master Stephen was that very evening singing.

But another headstone—

“With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked”—

quite outdoes Master Kelsey’s in strange English phrase. It reads: