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Updated: July 10, 2025
Hence steps have to be descended on entering the porches, and again in passing from the porches into the church. On the south side some levelling of the ground has been done, and the upright head-stones have been laid flat, but the altar tombs have been allowed to remain as they were.
They appear to date from the early time of the Lower Empire, and the cross has not yet been effaced from some which serve as head-stones for the True Believers. I was particularly struck with the abundance of altars, some of which contained entire and legible inscriptions. In the town there is the same abundance of ruins.
A well-trodden path led across the churchyard, and the gate being on the latch, we entered, and walked round among the graves and monuments. The latter were chiefly head-stones, none of which were very old, so far as was discoverable by the dates; some, indeed, in so ancient a cemetery, were disagreeably new, with inscriptions glittering like sunshine in gold letters.
It was not then choked up with buildings, but stood cosy and secluded in its well-stored garden of walnut, mulberry, and apple trees, with the head-stones to the poor fellow's pets the bullfinch and dog Dick, who died the same year as his master; and a very old mulberry tree stricken by lightning, and only held together by the iron braces made by his directions, perhaps applied with his own hands.
The turf was parched away, like the grass of the surrounding paddocks; the mounds were cracked; the head-stones several of them ornate and costly stained with the drip from the trees and birds, and some distinctly out of the perpendicular. "It ought not to look like this," Deb apologised for it. "It ought to have been seen to. We used to come often, and bring water from the dam.
“You are in trouble,” he spoke hoarsely, as if murmuring an excuse for having come. She melted at once into the loveliest sorrow, her mobile features taking on a wan cast only enlivened by the glow of her cheeks. “Sit down,” she said, “you were so good to come to me, and so soon—” and her voice was like lily-bells in a quiet church-yard among the head-stones. She placed him a chair.
It was a big, noble heart over which Jerry Langley buttoned his driver's coat, and when the physician who had arrived pronounced the lady too ill to proceed any further, he called aside the fidgety landlord, whose peculiarities he well knew, and bade him "not to fret and stew, for if the gal hadn't money, Jerry Langley was good for a longer time than she would live, poor critter;" and he wiped a tear away, glancing, the while, at the burying-ground which lay just across the garden, and thinking how if she died, her grave should be beneath the wide-spreading oak, where often in the summer nights he sat, counting the head-stones which marked the last resting place of the slumbering host, and wondering if death were, as some had said, a long, eternal sleep.
"The graveyard was a forlorn and barren spot on the hill-side, just the hither side of the fort: thirty or forty rough head-stones, few of which retained any semblance of the perpendicular, while many were so shattered and decayed as to seem nothing more than irregular natural projections from the ground. Who the black woman might be I knew not, and did not stay to inquire.
Most of the mounds had no head-stones to recall the names of the neglected dead, but here and there were dotted discoloured slabs, some sunk a foot or two into the soil, a few lying prone upon it, and the remainder thrown by the gradual subsidence of their supports into every variety of angle, as though they had been suddenly halted in the maddest whirl of a grotesque dance of death.
The South was the vanquished, stricken in spirits, and ruined in possessions; her dead lie scattered along every battle ground from Cemetery Ridge and the Round Top at Gettysburg, to the Gulf and far beyond the Father of Waters. One inscription on the head-stones would answer for nearly all, and marked "unknown."
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