We think Greenwood is healthier than Broadway, and Laurel Hill than Chestnut street, Pere la Chaise than Champs Elysees.  Urns, with ashes scientifically prepared, may look very well in Madras or Pekin, but not in a Christian country.  Not having been able to shake off the Bible notions about Christian burial, we adhere to the mode that was observed when devout men carried Stephen to his burial.  Better not come around here with your chemical apparatus for the reduction of the human body.  I give fair warning that if your philosopher attempts such a process on my bones, and I am of the same way of thinking as now, he will be sorry for it.

But I have no fear that I shall thus be desecrated by my surviving friends.  I have more fear of epitaphs.  I do not wonder that people have sometimes dictated the inscription on their own tombstones when I see what inappropriate lines are chiseled on many a slab.  There needs to be a reformation in epitaphiology.

People often ask me for appropriate inscriptions for the graves of their dead.  They tell the virtues of the father, or wife, or child, and want me to put in compressed shape all that catalogue of excellences.

Of course I fail in the attempt.  The story of a lifetime cannot be chiseled by the stone-cutter on the side of a marble slab.  But it is not a rare thing to go a few months after by the sacred spot and find that the bereft friends, unable to get from others an epitaph sufficiently eulogistic, have put their own brain and heart to work and composed a rhyme.  Now, the most unfit sphere on earth for an inexperienced mind to exercise the poetic faculty is in epitaphiology.  It does very well in copy-books, but it is most unfair to blot the resting-place of the dead with unskilled poetic scribble.  It seems to me that the owners of cemeteries and graveyards should keep in their own hand the right to refuse inappropriate and ludicrous epitaph.

Nine-tenths of those who think they can write respectable poetry are mistaken.  I do not say that poesy has passed from the earth, but it does seem as if the fountain Hippocrene had been drained off to run a saw-mill.  It is safe to say that most of the home-made poetry of graveyards is an offence to God and man.

One would have thought that the New Hampshire village would have risen in mob to prevent the inscription that was really placed on one of its tombstones descriptive of a man who had lost his life at the foot of a vicious mare on the way to brook: 

  “As this man was leading her to drink
  She kick’d and kill’d him quicker’n a wink.”

One would have thought that even conservative New Jersey would have been in rebellion at a child’s epitaph which in a village of that State reads thus: 

  “She was not smart, she was not fair,
    But hearts with grief for her are swellin’;
  All empty stands her little chair: 
    She died of eatin’ watermelon.”