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After skirting the little town of Westhope and the gardens of Westhope Abbey, the Drone lays itself out in comfortable curves and twists innumerable through the length and breadth of the green country till it reaches Warpington, whose church is so near the stream that in time of flood the water hitches all kinds of things it has no further use for among the grave-stones of the little church-yard.
As we go on the down-hill journey, the mile-stones are grave-stones, and on each more and more names are written; unless haply you live beyond man's common age, when friends have dropped off, and, tottering, and feeble, and unpitied, you reach the terminus alone. In this past year's diary is there any precious day noted on which you have made a new friend?
A pair of scales, in remembrance of the last judgment, and a house, have been occasionally discovered on ancient grave-stones; and once, a simple curriculum has been traced with the pole thrown backwards and a whip leaning against it, an unmistakable allusion to a departure for that place where "the weary are at rest."
I asked the miller whether he could point out to me any tombs or grave-stones of Gronwy's family, but he told me that he was not aware of any. On looking about I found the name of Owen in the inscription on the slate slab of a respectable-looking modern tomb, on the north-east side of the church.
A dreary season it was to the family in the parsonage: their usual walks obstructed by the spongy state of the moors the passing and funeral bells so frequently tolling, and filling the heavy air with their mournful sound and, when they were still, the "chip, chip," of the mason, as he cut the grave-stones in a shed close by.
He was hurrying us along the narrow paths now, past the little company of grave-stones, graves that were bearing their barbaric burdens of mortuary wreaths, of beaded crosses, and the motley assemblage, common to all French graveyards, of hideous shrines encasing tin saints and madonnas in plaster.
There are only some grave-stones flat on the earth, and we could see no inscriptions. How far short was this of marble monuments, like those in Westminster Abbey, which I had imagined here! The grave-stones of Sir Allan M'Lean's family, and of that of M'Quarrie, had as good an appearance as the royal grave-stones; if they were royal, we doubted.
Some country-gentleman having recommended a tax upon grave-stones as a substitute for it, Sheridan replied that: "Such a tax, indeed, was not easily evaded, and could not be deemed oppressive, as it would only be once paid; but so great was the spirit of clamor against the tax on receipts, that he should not wonder if it extended to them; and that it should be asserted, that persons having paid the last debt, the debt of nature, government had resolved they should pay a receipt-tax, and have it stamped over their grave.
Long rows of grave-stones, side by side, of similar names, but various dates, showed that generation after generation of the same families had followed each other and been garnered together in this last gathering-place of kindred. Let me speak of this quiet grave-yard with all due reverence, for I owe it amends for the heedlessness of my boyish days.
We passed the remains of a very large town, which, from the only evidence of antiquity afforded by ruins in this country, must have been inhabited for a long period; the millstones of gneiss, trap, and quartz were worn down two and a half inches perpendicularly. The ivory grave-stones soon rot away.
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