Again:
"Many a cold wind o'er my body shall roll
While in Abraham's bosom I'm feasting my soul"
appropriate certainly, as the grave was on a cold northeast slope of one of our bleak hills. Again, a Dutchman's epitaph for his twin babes:
"Here lies two babes, dead as two nits,
Who shook to death mit ague fits.
They was too good to live mit me.
So God He took 'em to live mit He."
There is the grave of a young man who, dying suddenly, was eulogized with this strange aim at the sublime:
"He lived,
He died!"
Not a hundred miles from Boston is a gravestone the epitaph upon which, to all who knew the parties, borders strongly upon the burlesque. A widower who within a few months buried his wife and adopted daughter, the former of whom was all her life long a thorn in his flesh, and whose death could not but have been a relief, wrote thus: "They were lovely and beloved in their lives, and in death were not divided." Poor man! Well he knew how full of strife and sorrow an evil woman can make life! He was worn to a shadow before her death, and his hair was all gone. Many of the neighbors thought surely that he well knew what had become of it, especially as it disappeared by the handful. But the grave covers all faults; and those who knew her could only hope that she might rest from her labors and her works follow her!
On a low, sandy mound far down on the Cape rises a tall slate stone, with fitting emblems and epitaphs as follows:
"Here lies Judy and John
That lovely pair,
John was killed by a whale,
And Judy sleeps here."
—Sketches of New England.