Mr. Snivel frets his fingers through his beard, and bows with an easy grace.

“Our first families!” repeats Madame Montford.

“Yes, indeed!  He is extremely correct over their funerals.  They are of a fashionable sort, you see.  Well, while I was musing over the decaying dead, and the distinction between poor dead and rich dead, there came along one Graves, a sort of wayward, half simpleton, who goes about among churchyards, makes graves a study, knows where every one who has died for the last century is tucked away, and is worth six sextons at pointing out graves.  He never knows anything about the living, for the living, he says, won’t let him live; and that being the case, he only wants to keep up his acquaintance with the dead.  He never has a hat to his head, nor a shoe to his foot; and where, and how he lives, no one can tell.  He has been at the whipping-post a dozen times or more, but I’m not so sure that the poor wretch ever did anything to merit such punishment.  Just as the crabbed old sexton was going to drive him out of the gate with a big stick, I says, more in the way of a joke than anything else:  ‘Graves, come here!—­I want a word or two with you.’  He came up, looking shy and suspicious, and saying he wasn’t going to harm anybody, but there was some fresh graves he was thinking over.”

“Some fresh graves!” repeats Madame Montford, nervously.

“Bless you!—­a very common thing,” rejoins Mr. Snivel, with a bow.  “Well, this lean simpleton said they (the graves) were made while he was sick.  That being the case, he was deprived-and he lamented it bitterly-of being present at the funerals, and getting the names of the deceased.  He is a great favorite with the grave-digger, lends him a willing hand on all occasions, and is extremely useful when the yellow fever rages.  But to the sexton he is a perfect pest, for if a grave be made during his absence he will importune until he get the name of the departed.  ‘Graves,’ says I, ’where do they bury these unfortunate women who die off so, here in Charleston?’ ’Bless you, my friend,’ says Graves, accompanying his words with an idiotic laugh, ’why, there’s three stacks of them, yonder.  They ship them from New York in lots, poor things; they dies here in droves, poor things; and we buries them yonder in piles, poor things.  They go-yes, sir, I have thought a deal of this thing-fast through life; but they dies, and nobody cares for them-you see how they are buried.’  I inquired if he knew all their names.  He said of course he did.  If he didn’t, nobody else would.  In order to try him, I desired he would show me the grave of Mag Munday.  He shook his head, smiled, muttered the name incoherently, and said he thought it sounded like a dead name.  ‘I’ll get my thinking right,’ he pursued, and brightening up all at once, his vacant eyes flashed, then he touched me cunningly on the arm, and with a wink and nod of the head there was no mistaking, led the way to a great mound located in an obscure part of the graveyard—­”