that is about us or belongs to us.  Look at that coffin of mine—­yet I tell you in its day it was a piece of furniture that would have attracted attention in any drawing-room in this city.  You may have it if you want it—­I can’t afford to repair it.  Put a new bottom in her, and part of a new top, and a bit of fresh lining along the left side, and you’ll find her about as comfortable as any receptacle of her species you ever tried.  No thanks no, don’t mention it you have been civil to me, and I would give you all the property I have got before I would seem ungrateful.  Now this winding-sheet is a kind of a sweet thing in its way, if you would like to—­No?  Well, just as you say, but I wished to be fair and liberal there’s nothing mean about me.  Good-by, friend, I must be going.  I may have a good way to go to-night —­don’t know.  I only know one thing for certain, and that is that I am on the emigrant trail now, and I’ll never sleep in that crazy old cemetery again.  I will travel till I fiend respectable quarters, if I have to hoof it to New Jersey.  All the boys are going.  It was decided in public conclave, last night, to emigrate, and by the time the sun rises there won’t be a bone left in our old habitations.  Such cemeteries may suit my surviving friends, but they do not suit the remains that have the honor to make these remarks.  My opinion is the general opinion.  If you doubt it, go and see how the departing ghosts upset things before they started.  They were almost riotous in their demonstrations of distaste.  Hello, here are some of the Bledsoes, and if you will give me a lift with this tombstone I guess I will join company and jog along with them—­mighty respectable old family, the Bledsoes, and used to always come out in six-horse hearses and all that sort of thing fifty years ago when I walked these streets in daylight.  Good-by, friend.”

And with his gravestone on his shoulder he joined the grisly procession, dragging his damaged coffin after him, for notwithstanding he pressed it upon me so earnestly, I utterly refused his hospitality.  I suppose that for as much as two hours these sad outcasts went clacking by, laden with their dismal effects, and all that time I sat pitying them.  One or two of the youngest and least dilapidated among them inquired about midnight trains on the railways, but the rest seemed unacquainted with that mode of travel, and merely asked about common public roads to various towns and cities, some of which are not on the map now, and vanished from it and from the earth as much as thirty years ago, and some few of them never had existed anywhere but on maps, and private ones in real-estate agencies at that.  And they asked about the condition of the cemeteries in these towns and cities, and about the reputation the citizens bore as to reverence for the dead.