THEY bury their dead in vaults,above the ground.These vaults have a resemblance to houses--sometimes to temples;are built of marble,generally;are architecturally graceful and shapely;they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery;and when one moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand,the phrase 'city of the dead'has all at once a meaning to him.
Many of the cemeteries are beautiful,and are kept in perfect order.
When one goes from the levee or the business streets near it,to a cemetery,he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead,they would find many advantages in it;and besides,their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world.Fresh flowers,in vases of water,are to be seen at the portals of many of the vaults:placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and children,husbands and wives,and renewed daily.A milder form of sorrow finds its inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and ugly but indestructible 'immortelle'--which is a wreath or cross or some such emblem,made of rosettes of black linen,with sometimes a yellow rosette at the conjunction of the cross's bars--kind of sorrowful breast-pin,so to say.The immortelle requires no attention:you just hang it up,and there you are;just leave it alone,it will take care of your grief for you,and keep it in mind better than you can;stands weather first-rate,and lasts like boiler-iron.
On sunny days,pretty little chameleons--gracefullest of legged reptiles--creep along the marble fronts of the vaults,and catch flies.Their changes of color--as to variety--are not up to the creature's reputation.
They change color when a person comes along and hangs up an immortelle;but that is nothing:any right-feeling reptile would do that.
I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards.I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it,but I cannot accomplish it.I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it.It is all grotesque,ghastly,horrible.
Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages,when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground,to glut the earth and the plant-roots,and the air with disease-germs,five or fifty,or maybe a hundred persons must die before their proper time;but they are hardly justifiable now,when even the children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse.It is a grim sort of a thought.
The relics of St.Anne,up in Canada,have now,after nineteen hundred years,gone to curing the sick by the dozen.
But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics,within a generation after St.Anne's death and burial,MADE several thousand people sick.Therefore these miracle-performances are simply compensation,nothing more.
St.Anne is somewhat slow pay,for a Saint,it is true;but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years,and outlawed by the statute of limitations,than not paid at all;and most of the knights of the halo do not pay at all.
Where you find one that pays--like St.Anne--you find a hundred and fifty that take the benefit of the statute.
And none of them pay any more than the principal of what they owe--they pay none of the interest either simple or compound.