Some gravediggers will tell you that the natural destiny of the gravestone is the grave!  They will shew you the old fellows slowly descending into the ground, and they have heard the parson say perhaps that the “trembling of the earth” will in time shake them all inevitably out of sight.  I have heard it mentioned as an article of belief among sextons that a hundred years is the fair measure of a head-stone’s “life” above ground, but this reckoning is much too short for the evidences, and makes no allowance for variable circumstances.  In some places, Keston for instance, the church is founded upon a bed of chalk, and out of the chalk the graves are laboriously hewn.  It is obvious therefore that the nature of the soil, as it is yielding or impervious, must be a prime factor in the question of survival.  It may be granted, however, that our progenitors in selecting their burial-grounds had the same preference for a suitable site as we have in our own day, and, notwithstanding exceptions which seem to shew that the church and not the churchyard was the one thing thought of, the law of a light soil for interments is sufficiently regular to give us an average duration of a gravestone’s natural existence.  The term “natural” will apply neither to those fortunate ones whose lives are studiously prolonged, nor of course to the majority whose career is wilfully, negligently, or accidentally shortened.  But that, under ordinary circumstances, the stones gradually sink out of sight, and at a certain rate of progression, is beyond a doubt.  Two illustrations may help the realization of this fact, such as may be seen in hundreds of our churchyards.

[Illustration:  Fig. 80.  Bethnal green.

Illustration:  Fig. 81.  Plumstead.

Sinking gravestones.]

The sketch of Bethnal Green (Fig. 80) was made just as the churchyard was about to undergo a healthy conversion, and it marks a very long period of inaction.

The Plumstead case (Fig. 81), though less extreme, is even more informing, as it seems to measure the rate at which the disappearance goes on; the dates on the three stones coinciding accurately with their comparative depths in the ground.  Whether the motion of the earth has any influence in this connection need not now be discussed, because the burying of the gravestones may be accounted for in a simple and feasible manner, without recourse to scientific argument.  It is undoubtedly the burrowing of the worms, coupled with the wasting action of rain and frost, which causes the phenomenon.  Instead, however, of the sexton’s supposititious century, the period required for total disappearance may more accurately be regarded as from 200 to 250 years.  It has been found by careful observation in a few random cases that the stones subside at the rate of about one foot in forty or fifty years, and, as their ordinary height is from 5 feet to 5 feet 6 inches, we can readily tell, providing