and if there is another spot anywhere quite so infernal as Wabashville, why, I solemnly assure you I never found it.—­And now for the point which shall prick your conscience and penetrate your understanding!  Do the bears and wolves, the coons and foxes, the owls and wild-geese, find this region unhealthy, and get the chills and fever, and go around grumbling and cursing?  Don’t they find this climate especially salubrious and suited exactly to their constitutions?  Well, then, that’s because they belong here, and you don’t.  This region was never intended for the habitation of man:  it belongs exclusively to the wild beasts and the fowls of the air, and you have no business here. [Manifest signs of disapprobation on part of Deacon Taylor, an extensive owner of town-lots.] And if you persist in remaining here, what moral right have you to complain of God?...

“Remember, then, in conclusion, that, for millions of years before our race existed, mosquitoes, weeds, briers, thorns, thistles, snow-storms, and northeast winds prevailed upon this planet, and that during all this time it was pronounced by the Deity himself to be ‘very good.’  If, then, the earth appears to be evil, is it not because ’thine eye is evil’?  We share this world, my friends, with other races, whose wants are different from ours; and we are all of equal importance in the eyes of our Maker, who distributes to each its share of blessings—­man and monster both alike—­with impartial favor.  Is not thus the fallacy of the corruption of Nature exposed, and the lie against our Creator’s wisdom, love, and goodness dragged into noonday light?”

* * * * *

But it is time to recommence our rambles through the City of the Dead.

Right here I come across on a tombstone,—­“All our children.  Emma, aged 1 mo. 23 days.  John, 3 years 5 days.  Anna, aged 1 year 1 mo.”  As a physiologist, I might make some very instructive comments upon this; but I forbear.

And here, upon another, a few rods farther on, is an epitaph in verse:—­

  (FIRST VERSE.)

  “Calm be her slumbers near kindred are sighing,
  A husband deplores in deep anguish of heart,
  Beneath the cold earth unconsciously lying,
  No murmur can reach her, no tempest can start.”

  (SECOND VERSE.)

  “Calm be her sleep as the silence of even
  When hearts unto deep invocation give birth. 
  With a prayer she has knelt at the portal of heaven
  And found the admission she hoped for on earth_.”

Not to speak of the “poetry” just here, how charmingly consistent with each other are the ideas contained in the passages I have italicized!  In the first verse, you observe, the inmate is sleeping unconscious beneath the ground:  in the second verse, she has ascended to heaven and found admittance to mansions in the skies!—­A similar confusion and contradiction of ideas occur in most of the epitaphs