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Updated: June 17, 2025
The thick black heads of the bulrushes stood up motionless like grave-stones, and the grey silken tufts of the bog-grass, fluttering in the cold breath of a November morning, were as ghostly hands, threatening or warning me.
The air was filled with a rain of plough-shares, grave-stones, and marble balls, intermixed with the heads, limbs, and bodies, of what had been human beings. Slabs of granite, vomited by the flaming ship, were found afterwards at a league's distance, and buried deep in the earth.
Pomponius Mela even mentions a savage nation, in the interior of Africa, who laid themselves down to sleep on the grave-stones of their ancestors, and looked upon the dreams they had on those spots as oracles from the dead. We shall see, hereafter, that this superstition was equally indigenous among the Egyptians.
It seems the ancient grave-yard, where the regicides repose, was found very desirable for a public square; and as a mimic Père-la-Chaise had just been created in the outskirts of the town, away went coffins and bones, grave-stones and sepulchral effigies, and monumental urns, to plant the new city of the dead, and make way for living dogs, as better than defunct lions.
Amongst plants, the olive, the vine, and the palm were favourite symbols, the latter being generally reserved for the grave-stones of martyrs. Birds, too, are frequently met with on the walls of houses: the phoenix and the peacock being emblems of immortality.
Most of the shops on each side of the streets bore the same names and looked but little altered. In the churchyard the same grave-stones were standing as they stood when he, as a child, spelt out their inscriptions through the open railings which separated them from the causeway.
His house was at Benton, about a mile off. There was a short cut through the Churchyard, but just as I was about to pass the wicket, I saw what I thought was a white figure moving about amongst the grave-stones. I took it for a ghost!
When all was over, the sergeant reported him to me, for bragging 'that he could have buried them six feet deep himself in two hours, and have covered them up so nately after, that the devil couldn't stick a tooth in them; but he had kept the secret to be revenged of the corporal, who had 'listed him one day, and of the drummer who had 'flogged him. 'Please your honour, said he, when called before me, 'I was sartain you wished to find work for us this cowld weather, and it wouldn't become me to say what your honour knew as well as myself that a rousing fire would soften any frost; and sure, only I know you compassionated the poor starving wolves, I'd have thrown a few buckets of water through the grave-stones, and clinched 'em as tight as the bars of Newgate."
Upon many of these grave-stones were displayed evidences of the lingering pride of gentle birth; recollections which, suppressed, or perhaps forgotten in the land of equality during life, seemed to have survived the grave, stronger than death.
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.
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