“I wanted ye to see the place,” said he.  “Yon’s the stane.  Euphemia Ross:  that was my goodwife, your grandmither—­hoots!  I’m wrong; that was my first yin; I had no bairns by her;—­yours is the second, Mary Murray, Born 1819, Died 1850:  that’s her—­a fine, plain, decent sort of a creature, tak’ her athegether.  Alexander Loudon, Born Seventeen Ninety-Twa, Died—­and then a hole in the ballant:  that’s me.  Alexander’s my name.  They ca’d me Ecky when I was a boy.  Eh, Ecky! ye’re an awfu’ auld man!”

I had a second and sadder experience of graveyards at my next alighting-place, the city of Muskegon, now rendered conspicuous by the dome of the new capitol encaged in scaffolding.  It was late in the afternoon when I arrived, and raining; and as I walked in great streets, of the very name of which I was quite ignorant—­double, treble, and quadruple lines of horse-cars jingling by—­hundred-fold wires of telegraph and telephone matting heaven above my head—­huge, staring houses, garish and gloomy, flanking me from either hand—­the thought of the Rue Racine, ay, and of the cabman’s eating-house, brought tears to my eyes.  The whole monotonous Babel had grown, or I should rather say swelled, with such a leap since my departure, that I must continually inquire my way; and the very cemetery was brand new.  Death, however, had been active; the graves were already numerous, and I must pick my way in the rain, among the tawdry sepulchres of millionnaires, and past the plain black crosses of Hungarian labourers, till chance or instinct led me to the place that was my father’s.  The stone had been erected (I knew already) “by admiring friends”; I could now judge their taste in monuments; their taste in literature, methought, I could imagine, and I refrained from drawing near enough to read the terms of the inscription.  But the name was in larger letters and stared at me—­James K. Dodd.  What a singular thing is a name, I thought; how it clings to a man, and continually misrepresents, and then survives him; and it flashed across my mind, with a mixture of regret and bitter mirth, that I had never known, and now probably never should know, what the K had represented.  King, Kilter, Kay, Kaiser, I went, running over names at random, and then stumbled with ludicrous misspelling on Kornelius, and had nearly laughed aloud.  I have never been more childish; I suppose (although the deeper voices of my nature seemed all dumb) because I have never been more moved.  And at this last incongruous antic of my nerves, I was seized with a panic of remorse and fled the cemetery.

Scarce less funereal was the rest of my experience in Muskegon, where, nevertheless, I lingered, visiting my father’s circle, for some days.  It was in piety to him I lingered; and I might have spared myself the pain.  His memory was already quite gone out.  For his sake, indeed, I was made welcome; and for mine the conversation rolled awhile with laborious effort on the virtues of the deceased.  His former