said John Brown . `` I have house-room for you and Tabby , and a safe vault for the chest of treasure . To-morrow we will try to come to an agreement about the sale of this old house ; real estate is well up , and I could afford you a pretty handsome price . '' `` And I , '' observed Peter Goldthwaite , with reviving spirits , `` have a plan for laying out the cash to great advantage . '' `` Why , as to that , '' muttered John Brown to himself , `` we must apply to the next court for a guardian to take care of the solid cash ; and if Peter insists upon speculating , he may do it to his heart 's content with old Peter Goldthwaite 's treasure . '' CHIPPINGS WITH A CHISEL . Passing a summer several years since at Edgartown , on the island of Martha 's Vineyard , I became acquainted with a certain carver of tombstones who had travelled and voyaged thither from the interior of Massachusetts in search of professional employment . The speculation had turned out so successful that my friend expected to transmute slate and marble into silver and gold to the amount of at least a thousand dollars during the few months of his sojourn at Nantucket and the Vineyard . The secluded life and the simple and primitive spirit which still characterizes the inhabitants of those islands , especially of Martha 's Vineyard , insure their dead friends a longer and dearer remembrance than the daily novelty and revolving bustle of the world can elsewhere afford to beings of the past . Yet , while every family is anxious to erect a memorial to its departed members , the untainted breath of Ocean bestows such health and length of days upon the people of the isles as would cause a melancholy dearth of business to a resident artist in that line . His own monument , recording his decease by starvation , would probably be an early specimen of his skill . Gravestones , therefore , have generally been an article of imported merchandise . In my walks through the burial-ground of Edgartown -- where the dead have lain so long that the soil , once enriched by their decay , has returned to its original barrenness -- in that ancient burial-ground I noticed much variety of monumental sculpture . The elder stones , dated a century back or more , have borders elaborately carved with flowers and are adorned with a multiplicity of death 's - heads , crossbones , scythes , hour-glasses , and other lugubrious emblems of mortality , with here and there a winged cherub to direct the mourner 's spirit upward . These productions of Gothic taste must have been quite beyond the colonial skill of the day , and were probably carved in London and brought across the ocean to commemorate the defunct worthies of this lonely isle . The more recent monuments are mere slabs of slate in the ordinary style , without any superfluous flourishes to set off the bald inscriptions . But others -- and those far the most impressive both to my taste and feelings -- were roughly hewn from the gray rocks of the island , evidently by the unskilled hands of surviving friends and relatives . On some there were merely the initials of a name ; some were inscribed with misspelt prose or rhyme , in deep letters which the moss and wintry rain of many years had not been able to obliterate . These , these were graves where loved ones slept . It is an old theme of satire , the falsehood and vanity of monumental eulogies ; but when affection and sorrow grave the letters with their own painful labor , then we may be sure that they copy from the record on their hearts .
My acquaintance the sculptor -- he may share that title with Greenough , since the dauber of signs is a painter as well as Raphael -- had found a ready market for all his blank XXXXX of marble and full occupation in lettering and ornamenting them .
Brown CHIPPINGS Goldthwaite Gravestones Ocean emblems eulogies labor slabs years