They are all about ruined.  The most substantial people in our set, they were.  And now look at them—­utterly used up and poverty-stricken.  One of the Bledsoes actually traded his monument to a late barkeeper for some fresh shavings to put under his head.  I tell you it speaks volumes, for there is nothing a corpse takes so much pride in as his monument.  He loves to read the inscription.  He comes after a while to believe what it says himself, and then you may see him sitting on the fence night after night enjoying it.  Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was alive.  I wish they were used more.  Now I don’t complain, but confidentially I do think it was a little shabby in my descendants to give me nothing but this old slab of a gravestone—­and all the more that there isn’t a compliment on it.  It used to have: 

‘Goneto his just reward’

on it, and I was proud when I first saw it, but by and by I noticed that whenever an old friend of mine came along he would hook his chin on the railing and pull a long face and read along down till he came to that, and then he would chuckle to himself and walk off, looking satisfied and comfortable.  So I scratched it off to get rid of those fools.  But a dead man always takes a deal of pride in his monument.  Yonder goes half a dozen of the Jarvises now, with the family monument along.  And Smithers and some hired specters went by with his awhile ago.  Hello, Higgins, good-by, old friend!  That’s Meredith Higgins—­died in ’44 —­belongs to our set in the cemetery—­fine old family—­great-grand mother was an Injun—­I am on the most familiar terms with him he didn’t hear me was the reason he didn’t answer me.  And I am sorry, too, because I would have liked to introduce you.  You would admire him.  He is the most disjointed, sway-backed, and generally distorted old skeleton you ever saw, but he is full of fun.  When he laughs it sounds like rasping two stones together, and he always starts it off with a cheery screech like raking a nail across a window-pane.  Hey, Jones!  That is old Columbus Jones—­shroud cost four hundred dollars entire trousseau, including monument, twenty-seven hundred.  This was in the spring of ’26.  It was enormous style for those days.  Dead people came all the way from the Alleghanies to see his things—­the party that occupied the grave next to mine remembers it well.  Now do you see that individual going along with a piece of a head-board under his arm, one leg-bone below his knee gone, and not a thing in the world on?  That is Barstow Dalhousie, and next to Columbus Jones he was the most sumptuously outfitted person that ever entered our cemetery.  We are all leaving.  We cannot tolerate the treatment we are receiving at the hands of our descendants.  They open new cemeteries, but they leave us to our ignominy.  They mend the streets, but they never mend anything