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It lay high on the cliffs, so lonely that if the Lost Ones were to sit evident on their crumbling head-boards and watch for ships all day long, not even a passing gull would be frighted. For you never take the least notice. But I can tell you one bit of news that will interest you. My Lord Duke of Lyonesse is better of his wound, for I have seen him twice.
The pale weather-washed head-boards told all about it: "Sacred to the memory of Private So-and-So, killed on the Dry Cheyenne, May 6, 1875." Or it would be, "Mrs. So-and-So, found scalped on Sage Creek." But even the financiers at Washington could not wholly preserve the Indian in Drybone's neighborhood.
At sunset we reached Funkstown, where the main body of our corps was in line of battle, having yesterday met the rebels and driven them more than a mile. Our friends of the Vermont brigade had, as usual, given a good account of themselves; and the head-boards of pine, here and there among the trees, showed that the victory had not been gained without a struggle.
The best of the Victorian period is attractive, but how can we express our opinion of those American monstrosities of the sixties or seventies, beds in rosewood and walnut, the head-boards covering the side of a room, bureaus proportionately huge, following out the idea that a piece of furniture to be beautiful must be very large and very expensive!
At the proper moment, therefore, our mainyard was laid aback, the stranger followed suit, and a minute or two later the two craft came to a stand abreast of each other, the stranger about a hundred fathoms to windward of us, near enough, indeed, for us to read with the unaided eye the name Mercury upon her head-boards.
It was plain that the food supply of the Erebus and the Terror must have been seriously depleted, and the dangers of starvation have set in long before three years were completed. Three graves were found on Beechey Island with head-boards marking the names and ages of three men of the crew who had died in the winter. Near a cape of the island was a cairn built of stone.
In one of his rambles, Noll came upon a little cluster of graves, with the rudest of monuments to mark them, most of them were rough head-boards in which the sleeper's name was cut or scratched, and this sight of such poor, uncared-for resting-places in the sand made him sad and thoughtful for more than one day. What if he were to die and be buried there, too? he surmised. The thought chilled him.
Nameless and penniless, he was overlooked by the census and ignored by the tax collector, while in a hotly-contested election for sheriff, when even the head-boards of the scant cemetery were consulted to fill the poll-lists, it was discovered that neither candidate had thought fit to avail himself of his actual vote.
About the tree were mounds with wooden head-boards, which wiser ones would have known the meaning of. But how could an ape or an idiot know of a freedom so sweet and silent and unencompassed and unconditional as death? And how could they know that the winners of so rich a prize should be mourned, should be wetted with tears, should be placed in the ground with the strutting pomp of grief?
The shadows multiplied the tale of the dead that the head-boards kept, each similitude askew in the moonlight on the turf below the slanting monument To judge by the motions of the men engaged in the burial and the mocking antics of their silhouettes on the ground, it must have been obvious to the spectator that they were already filling in the earth.
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