“Right you are.  How Shakespeare can ever stand it to have his grave walked over by a boy choir is more than I can understand.  If I had him here I could look after him right.  Come, I’ll show you the company I keep!”

Not twenty feet from where we stood was a fine but plain granite block to the memory of the second wife of James Russell Lowell.

“Just Mr. Lowell and one friend stood by the grave when we lowered the coffin—­just two men and no one else but the young clergyman who belongs here.  Mr. Lowell shook hands with me when he went away.  He gave me a guinea and wrote me two letters afterward from America; the last was sent only a week before he died.  I’ll show ’em to you when we go to the office.  Say, did you know him?”

He pointed to a slab, on which I read the name of Sydney Smith.  Then we went to the graves of Mulready, the painter; Kemble, the actor; Sir Charles Eastlake, the artist.  Next came the resting-place of Buckle—­immortal for writing a preface—­dead at thirty-seven, with his history unwrit; Leigh Hunt sleeps near, and above his dust a column that explains how it was erected by friends.  In life he asked for bread; when dead they gave him a costly pile of stone.

Here are also the graves of Madame Tietjens; of Charles Mathews, the actor; and of Admiral Sir John Ross, the Arctic explorer.

“And just down the hill aways another big man is buried.  I knew him well; he used to come and visit us often.  The last time I saw him I said as he was going away, ‘Come again, sir; you are always welcome!’

“‘Thank you, Mr. First Gravedigger,’ says he; ’I will come again before long, and make you an extended visit.’  In less than a year the hearse brought him.  That’s his grave—­push that ivy away and you can read the inscription.  Did you ever hear of him?”

It was a plain, heavy slab placed horizontally, and the ivy had so run over it that the white of the marble was nearly obscured.  But I made out this inscription: 

William Makepeace Thackeray Born July 18, 1811 Died Dec. 24, 1863 Anne Carmichael Smyth Died Dec. 18, 1864, aged 72—­his mother by her first marriage

The unpoetic exactness of that pedigree gave me a slight chill.  But here they sleep—­mother and son in one grave.  She who gave him his first caress also gave him his last; and when he was found dead in his bed, his mother, who lived under the same roof, was the first one called.  He was the child of her girlhood—­she was scarcely twenty when she bore him.  In life they were never separated, and in death they are not divided.  It is as both desired.

Thackeray was born in India, and was brought to England on the death of his father, when he was six years of age.  On the way from Calcutta the ship touched at the Island of Saint Helena.  A servant took the lad ashore and they walked up the rocky heights to Longwood, and there, pacing back and forth in a garden, they saw a short, stout man.