Told by the Colonel

by W. L. Alden

THOMPSON’S TOMBSTONE.

We had just dined in the little Parisian restaurant where Americans are in the habit of going in order to obtain those truly French delicacies, pork and beans, buckwheat cakes, corned beef, apple pie, and overgrown oysters. I knew a man from Chicago who dined at this restaurant every day during the entire month spent by him in Paris, and who, at the end of that time, said that he was heartily sick of French cookery. Thus does the profound study of the manners and customs of foreign nations enlighten the mind and ripen the judgment.

The Colonel had finished his twelfth buckwheat cake and had lighted his cigar, when he casually and reprovingly remarked to young Lathrop, who, on principle, was disputing the bill with the waiter, that “he was making more trouble than Thompson’s tombstone.” Being called upon to explain this dark saying, he stretched his legs to their limit, tipped back his chair, knocked the ashes of his cigar among the remnants of his pork and beans, and launched into his story.

“In the town where I was raised—and I’m not going to give away the name of it at present—there were two brothers, James and John Thompson. They were twins and about forty years old, as I should judge. James was a bachelor and John he was a widower, and they were both pretty well to do in the world, for those times at least. John was a farmer and James was a wagon maker and owned the village hearse besides, which he let out for funerals, generally driving it himself, so that any profit that was to be made out of a melancholy occasion he could make without sharing it with anybody. Both the men were close-fisted, and would look at a dollar until their eyesight began to fail before they could bring themselves to spend it. It was this miserly spirit that brought about the trouble that I’m going to tell you of.

“After John Thompson had been a widower so long that the unmarried women had given up calling on him to ask his advice about the best way of raising money for the heathen, and had lost all expectation that any one of them would ever gather him in, he suddenly ups and marries Maria Slocum, who used to keep a candy store next door to the school-house and had been a confirmed old maid for twenty years. She had a little money, though, and folks did say that she could have married James Thompson if she had been willing to take the risk; but the fact that James always had the hearse standing in his carriage-house made him unpopular with the ladies. She took John because his views on infant baptism agreed with hers, and he took her because she had a good reputation for making pies and was economical and religious.

“The Thompson brothers owned burial lots in the new cemetery that were close together. James, of course, had, so far, no use for his lot, but John had begun to settle his by burying his first wife in about the middle of it. The lot was a good-sized one, with accommodation for a reasonably large family without crowding them, and without, at the same time, scattering them in any unsocial way. I don’t know how it came about, but no sooner was John married than he took a notion to put up a tombstone over his first wife. He thought that as he was going to incur such an expense he would manage it so that he wouldn’t have to incur it again; and so he got up a design for a combination family tombstone, and had it made, and carved, and lettered, and set up in his burial lot.

“Near the top of the stone was John Thompson’s name, the date of his birth, and a blank space for the date of his death. Next came the name of ‘Sarah Jane, beloved wife of the above,’ and the date of her birth and death. Then came the name of ‘Maria, beloved and lamented wife of the above John Thompson,’ with the date of her birth and a space for the date of her death. You see, John worked in this little compliment about Maria being ‘lamented’ so as to reconcile her to having the date of her birth given away to the public. The lower half of the tombstone was left vacant so as to throw in a few children should any such contingency arise, and the whole advertisement ended with a verse of a hymn setting forth that the entire Thompson family was united in a better land above.

“The cost of the affair was about the same as that of one ordinary tombstone, the maker agreeing to enter the dates of John’s death and of his wife’s death free of charge whenever the time for so doing might arrive; and also agreeing to enter the names of any children that might appear at a very low rate. The tombstone attracted a great deal of attention, and the summer visitors from the city never failed to go and see it. John was proud of his stroke of economy, and used to say that he wasn’t in danger of being bankrupted by any epidemic, as those people were who held that every person must have his separate tombstone. Everybody admitted that the Thompson tombstone gave more general amusement to the public than any other tombstone in the whole cemetery. Every summer night John used to walk over to his lot and smoke his pipe, leaning on the fence and reading over the inscriptions. And then he would go and take a fresh look at the Rogers’ lot, where there were nine different tombstones, and chuckle to think how much they must have cost old man Rogers, who had never thought of a combination family tomb. In the course of about three years the inscriptions had grown, for there had been added the names of Charles Henry and William Everett Thompson, ‘children of the above John and Maria Thompson,’ and John calculated that with squeezing he could enter four more children on the same stone, though he didn’t really think that he would ever have any call so to do.

“Well, a little after the end of the third year John’s troubles began. He took up with Second Advent notions and believed that the end of the world would arrive, as per schedule, on the 21st of November, at 8:30 A.M. Maria said that this was not orthodox and that she wouldn’t allow any such talk around her house. Both of them were set in their ways, and what with John expressing his views with his whip-handle and Maria expressing hers with the rolling-pin, they didn’t seem to get on very well together, and one day Maria left the house and took the train to Chicago, where she got a divorce and came back a free and independent woman. That wasn’t all: James Thompson now saw his chance. He offered to sell out the hearse business, and after waiting ten months, so as to give no opportunity for scandal, Maria married him.