But propriety and convention of the times insisted that something appear carved on the headstone, and so the indomitable woman left the choice of verse entirely up to the local stone-cutter. He resorted to the stock phrase:
“As I am now, so you will be—
Prepare for death and follow me.”
Convention thus being satisfied, no more was thought of the matter, but when friends and relatives paid their next visit to the grave, they were shocked and stunned to see, carved beneath the stone-cutter’s verse, these lines:
“To follow you I’ll not consent,
Because—I know which way you went!”
... The Singular Case of the
Young Anatomist
Fate, that capricious ruler of the tides that governs our lives, arranged a meeting on the wild, windswept Hill of Storms in Truro on Cape Cod; a meeting so strange that, for the sake of credulity, I must withhold the name of the earthly being who took part in it. For it was on a dark Fall night, long ago, that a Cape Cod boy, with nothing in his pockets but his dreams and a burning ambition, met and talked with a live skeleton, and, caught up on the crest of Fate’s precarious wave, was swept high to Fame and Fortune.
We will call him Tom, and nothing else, this young and ardent hero of our story, for if, in the telling of this strange tale, which I swear to be true, the real name of the young man were disclosed, you, gentle reader, would scoff and read no further.