Page:Creole Sketches.djvu/166

136 bat-haunted prisons and our ruined cemeteries seem to answer in the affirmative.

They are hideous Golgothas, these old intramural cemeteries of ours. In other cities the cemeteries are beautiful with all that the art of the gardener and the sculptor can give. They are often beautiful parks, in which shafts of rosy granite or pale marble rise in pleasant relief against a background of ornamental shrubbery; — birds are singing in the trees; — flowers are growing upon the gently swelling eminences which mark the sleep of the dead. There horror is masked and hidden. Here it glares at us with empty sockets.

The tombs are fissured, or have caved in, or have crumbled down into shapeless masses of brick and mortar; — the plaster, falling away, betrays the hollow mockery of the frail monuments; — the vases are full of green water and foulness; — the