corpora, we might say, if the measure allowed.  When the stone is a slight one, it does not oppress the spirits of the traveller to meditate by it; but these did seem a little heathenish to us; and so are all large monuments over men’s bodies, from the pyramids down.  A monument should at least be “star-y-pointing,” to indicate whither the spirit is gone, and not prostrate, like the body it has deserted.  There have been some nations who could do nothing but construct tombs, and these are the only traces which they have left.  They are the heathen.  But why these stones, so upright and emphatic, like exclamation-points?  What was there so remarkable that lived?  Why should the monument be so much more enduring than the fame which it is designed to perpetuate,—­a stone to a bone?  “Here lies,”—­“Here lies";—­why do they not sometimes write, There rises?  Is it a monument to the body only that is intended?  “Having reached the term of his natural life";—­would it not be truer to say, Having reached the term of his unnatural life?  The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.  If any character is given, it should be as severely true as the decision of the three judges below, and not the partial testimony of friends.  Friends and contemporaries should supply only the name and date, and leave it to posterity to write the epitaph.

Here lies an honest man,
Rear-Admiral Van.

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Faith, then ye have
Two in one grave,
For in his favor,
Here too lies the Engraver.

Fame itself is but an epitaph; as late, as false, as true.  But they only are the true epitaphs which Old Mortality retouches.

A man might well pray that he may not taboo or curse any portion of nature by being buried in it.  For the most part, the best man’s spirit makes a fearful sprite to haunt his grave, and it is therefore much to the credit of Little John, the famous follower of Robin Hood, and reflecting favorably on his character, that his grave was “long celebrous for the yielding of excellent whetstones.”  I confess that I have but little love for such collections as they have at the Catacombs, Pere la Chaise, Mount Auburn, and even this Dunstable graveyard.  At any rate, nothing but great antiquity can make graveyards interesting to me.  I have no friends there.  It may be that I am not competent to write the poetry of the grave.  The farmer who has skimmed his farm might perchance leave his body to Nature to be ploughed in, and in some measure restore its fertility.  We should not retard but forward her economies.

Soon the village of Nashua was out of sight, and the woods were gained again, and we rowed slowly on before sunset, looking for a solitary place in which to spend the night.  A few evening clouds began to be reflected in the water and the surface was dimpled only here and there by a muskrat crossing the stream.  We camped at length near Penichook Brook, on the confines of what is now Nashville, by a deep ravine, under the skirts of a pine wood, where the dead pine-leaves were our carpet, and their tawny boughs stretched overhead.  But fire and smoke soon tamed the scene; the rocks consented to be our walls, and the pines our roof.  A woodside was already the fittest locality for us.