“Abroad” is a big place, and no sufficient treatment under the head of this chapter is possible except to one who has had very great experience and extended research.  Nevertheless I may, with all due diffidence and modesty, tell the little I know on the subject.  My opportunities of investigation have been few, and restricted to a limited area—­so restricted and so limited that I cannot tell whether or not the observations I have made may be taken as indications of national habits or merely as idiosyncrasies of the people inhabiting the particular localities which I was able to visit.  All the churchyards which I have seen in France, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland very much resemble each other, and are altogether unlike the graveyards of Great Britain and her children.  It is to the villages we should naturally go for primitive memorials of the dead, but in all the continental villages which I have visited memorials of a permanent character, either old or new, are scarcely to be seen.  Occasionally a stone slab may be encountered, but almost always of recent date.  At Laufen in the Canton of Zurich, near the Falls of the Rhine, I selected almost at random the examples of memorials shewn in my sketch (Fig. 96), one or other of which was at the head of nearly every grave.

Fig. 96.—­At Laufen.

The average height of these mementoes was about 2 feet, and all the dates which I saw were of the last twenty-five years.  Permanence indeed is apparently not considered as it is with us in the like circumstances.  The British gravestone is trusted to perpetuate at least the names of our departed friends down to the days of our posterity, but the provision made by our neighbours seems to have been for the existing generation only.  Posterity does not trouble the villagers of Switzerland nor their prototypes of other nations around them.  This fact was strongly exemplified at Neuhausen, a small place on the other bank of the Rhine, “five minutes from Germany” we were told.

Fig. 97.—­At Neuhausen.

In the churchyard at this place was one handsome tombstone, shewn in the drawing, erected apparently in 1790.  This was evidence of somewhat ancient art, and I looked about for the old gravestones which should have kept it company.  Erect in its place there was not one, but in the remotest corner of the enclosure I came upon several stones lying flat, one upon another, the uppermost and only visible inscription bearing the recent date of 1870!  Only twenty years or so “on sentry” at the grave, and already relieved from duty!  There was likewise a miscellaneous heap of old crosses, etc., of iron and wood, the writing on which had disappeared, and they might reasonably have been condemned as of no further service; but that gravestones in perfect preservation should have been thought to have served their full purpose in a little over twenty years, and be cast aside as no longer requisite, was a remarkable lesson in national character.  All the graves were flat, and at the head of every recent one was a small iron slab bearing a number.  Many of those which had crosses were hung with immortelles, composed generally of glass-beads.