We walked under Mr. Paddock’s row of English elms.  The gray squirrels were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them came toward us in light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to the rail of the burial-ground.  He was on a grave with a broad blue-slate-stone at its head, and a shrub growing on it.  The stone said this was the grave of a young man who was the son of an Honorable gentleman, and who died a hundred years ago and more.  —­Oh, yes, died,—­with a small triangular mark in one breast, and another smaller opposite, in his back, where another young man’s rapier had slid through his body; and so he lay down out there on the Common, and was found cold the next morning, with the night-dews and the death-dews mingled on his forehead.

Let us have one look at poor Benjamin’s grave,—­said I.—­His bones lie where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone says they lie,—­which is more than can be said of most of the tenants of this and several other burial-grounds.

[The most accursed act of Vandalism ever committed within my knowledge was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at least of our city burialgrounds, and one at least just outside the city, and planting them in rows to suit the taste for symmetry of the perpetrators.  Many years ago, when this disgraceful process was going on under my eyes, I addressed an indignant remonstrance to a leading journal.  I suppose it was deficient in literary elegance, or too warm in its language; for no notice was taken of it, and the hyena-horror was allowed to complete itself in the face of daylight.  I have never got over it.  The bones of my own ancestors, being entombed, lie beneath their own tablet; but the upright stones have been shuffled about like chessmen, and nothing short of the Day of Judgment will tell whose dust lies beneath any of those records, meant by affection to mark one small spot as sacred to some cherished memory.  Shame! shame! shame!—­that is all I can say.  It was on public thoroughfares, under the eye of authority, that this infamy was enacted.  The red Indians would have known better; the selectmen of an African kraal-village would have had more respect for their ancestors.  I should like to see the gravestones which have been disturbed all removed, and the ground levelled, leaving the flat tombstones; epitaphs were never famous for truth, but the old reproach of “Here lies” never had such a wholesale illustration as in these outraged burial-places, where the stone does lie above, and the bones do not lie beneath.]

Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman’s sigh over poor Benjamin’s dust.  Love killed him, I think.  Twenty years old, and out there fighting another young fellow on the Common, in the cool of that old July evening;—­yes, there must have been love at the bottom of it.

The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through the rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge.  That was all her comment upon what I told her.—­How women love Love! said I;—­but she did not speak.