Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/466

434 case, he may usurp their accommodations; but, until then, we hold that it is unfair for him to continue seated in a ladies' cabin when ladies are forced to stand. The case is entirely different from that of the street cars and omnibuses, because these have no separate apartments for gentlemen from which ladies are debarred by the filthy customs permitted there. Accordingly, in a car, if a gentleman give his seat to a lady, it is an act of courtesy or kindness, and not one of absolute right. But ladies have a different sort of claim in the ferry-boats. The remedy, in fine, for the present injustice, is two-fold. Either take down the signs which make a distinction between the cabins, abolish, as in the cars, those masculine privileges of smoking and spitting which render only a part of the boat habitable to ladies, and so give all an equal chance at seats and comfort—or else, on the other hand, enforce the rules which allow ladies the first chance at the privileges of their own cabin. Public sentiment and manly instinct ought to be sufficient for this purpose without resort to official regulation.

— must be owned that the living do not always treat the dead quite fairly, in the matter of epitaphs. There is hardly one of us, perhaps, that is sure (unless he takes due precaution) of not preaching on his gravestone such a sermon as he never cared to urge in his life. So soon as the dead man "slips behind a tomb" the living take the liberty of making him read just what moral lesson they please—not what he pleases. And it is not only the sentiment, but the form of the epitaph, which is often questionable, and which causes gravestone literature to be among the most grimly humorous of all compositions. Where a man, as many wise and witty, and public and private men have done, writes his own epitaph, we can believe that this is the exact homily which he wishes the traveller to gather from his fate, and so, where a poet composes obituary verses for his own decease, or a scholar fabricates some choice bit of Latinity for his own monument, it is all very well. But surely it is no less incongruous to find a pirate's stone saddled with a text from Scripture than to discover some most prosaic of men giving posthumous counsel in rhyme, and an unlettered peasant demanding Siste, viator, or declaring Hic facet. In strolling, the other day, through a New England graveyard (in the town of L.) we were struck with the profusion of metrical sentiments there, and ventured to copy a few of them at random, keeping the spelling as the originals prescribed, regardless of Murray and Goold Brown. The first was this couplet:

Another ran thus:

Another was as follows:

A fourth had a familiar turn:

A fifth ran thus:

Still another read:

Many more poetical inscriptions could be cited from this collection, and among them some in which strange effects had been produced by the graver's miscalculations of his space, whereby he was forced to detach letters from words—such as the n from "down" and the m from "trump"—and mount them above the lines in very small type. These last would remind one of that very old story of the man who, having lost his wife, wished the following dictum of Solomon to be placed upon her tombstone:

The graver, not having quite room to put in the word "crown," hit on an ingenious and happy substitute, and rendered the line as follows: