which had not at one time or other been inscribed on slate or marble.  His sole task and office among the immortal pilgrims of the tomb—­the duty for which Providence had sent the old man into the world, as it were with a chisel in his hand—­was to label the dead bodies, lest their names should be forgotten at the resurrection.  Yet he had not failed, within a narrow scope, to gather a few sprigs of earthly, and more than earthly, wisdom—­the harvest of many a grave.  And, lugubrious as his calling might appear, he was as cheerful an old soul as health and integrity and lack of care could make him, and used to set to work upon one sorrowful inscription or another with that sort of spirit which impels a man to sing at his labor.  On the whole, I found Mr. Wigglesworth an entertaining, and often instructive, if not an interesting, character; and, partly for the charm of his society, and still more because his work has an invariable attraction for “man that is born of woman,” I was accustomed to spend some hours a day at his workshop.  The quaintness of his remarks and their not infrequent truth—­a truth condensed and pointed by the limited sphere of his view—­gave a raciness to his talk which mere worldliness and general cultivation would at once have destroyed.

Sometimes we would discuss the respective merits of the various qualities of marble, numerous slabs of which were resting against the walls of the shop, or sometimes an hour or two would pass quietly without a word on either side while I watched how neatly his chisel struck out letter after letter of the names of the Nortons, the Mayhews, the Luces, the Daggets, and other immemorial families of the Vineyard.  Often with an artist’s pride the good old sculptor would speak of favorite productions of his skill which were scattered throughout the village graveyards of New England.  But my chief and most instructive amusement was to witness his interviews with his customers, who held interminable consultations about the form and fashion of the desired monuments, the buried excellence to be commemorated, the anguish to be expressed, and finally the lowest price in dollars and cents for which a marble transcript of their feelings might be obtained.  Really, my mind received many fresh ideas which perhaps may remain in it even longer than Mr. Wigglesworth’s hardest marble will retain the deepest strokes of his chisel.

An elderly lady came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been killed by a whale in the Pacific Ocean no less than forty years before.  It was singular that so strong an impression of early feeling should have survived through the changes of her subsequent life, in the course of which she had been a wife and a mother, and, so far as I could judge, a comfortable and happy woman.  Reflecting within myself, it appeared to me that this lifelong sorrow—­as, in all good faith, she deemed it—­was one of the most fortunate circumstances of her history.  It had given an ideality to her mind; it had kept her