(continued)

At our next meeting I found him chiseling an open book upon a marble head-stone, and concluded that it was meant to express the erudition of some black-letter clergyman of the Cotton Mather school.  It turned out, however, to be emblematical of the scriptural knowledge of an old woman who had never read any thing but her Bible; and the monument was a tribute to her piety and good works, from the Orthodox Church, of which she had been a member.  In strange contrast with this Christian woman's memorial, was that of an infidel, whose grave-stone, by his own direction, bore an avowal of his belief that the spirit within him would be extinguished like a flame, and that the nothingness whence he sprang would receive him again.  Mr. Wigglesworth consulted me as to the propriety of enabling a dead man's dust to utter this dreadful creed.

`If I thought,' said he, `that a single mortal would read the inscription without a shudder, my chisel should never cut a letter of it.  But when the grave speaks such falsehoods, the soul of man will know the truth by its own horror.'

`So it will,' said I, struck by the idea:  `the poor infidel may strive to preach blasphemies from his grave; but it will be only another method of impressing the soul with a consciousness of immortality.'

There was an old man by the name of Norton, noted throughout the island for his great wealth, which he had accumulated by the exercise of strong and shrewd faculties, combined with a most penurious disposition.  This wretched miser, conscious that he had not a friend to be mindful of him in his grave, had himself taken the needful precautions for posthumous remembrance, by bespeaking an immense slab of white marble, with a long epitaph in raised letters, the whole to be as magnificent as Mr. Wigglesworth's skill could make it.  There was something very characteristic in this contrivance to have his money's worth even from his own tomb-stone, which, indeed, afforded him more enjoyment in the few months that he lived thereafter, than it probably will in a whole century, now that it is laid over his bones.  This incident reminds me of a young girl, a pale, slender, feeble creature, most unlike the other rosy and healthful damsels of the Vineyard, amid whose brightness she was fading away.  Day after day did the poor maiden come to the sculptor's shop, and pass from one piece of marble to another, till at last she penciled her name upon a slender slab, which, I think, was of a more spotless white than all the rest.  I saw her no more, but soon afterwards found Mr. Wigglesworth cutting her virgin name into the stone which she had chosen.

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