In spite of his gray head and wrinkled brow , he was quite like a child in all matters save what had some reference to his own business ; he seemed , unless my fancy misled me , to view mankind in no other relation than as people in want of tombstones , and his literary attainments evidently comprehended very little either of prose of poetry which had not at one time or other been inscribed on slate or marble . His sole task and office among the immortal pilgrims of the tomb -- the duty for which Providence had sent the old man into the world , as it were with a chisel in his hand -- was to label the dead bodies , lest their names should be forgotten at the resurrection . Yet he had not failed , within a narrow scope , to gather a few sprigs of earthly , and more than earthly , wisdom -- the harvest of many a grave . And , lugubrious as his calling might appear , he was as cheerful an old soul as health and integrity and lack of care could make him , and used to set to work upon one sorrowful inscription or another with that sort of spirit which impels a man to sing at his labor . On the whole , I found Mr. Wigglesworth an entertaining , and often instructive , if not an interesting , character ; and , partly for the charm of his society , and still more because his work has an invariable attraction for `` man that is born of woman , '' I was accustomed to spend some hours a day at his workshop . The quaintness of his remarks and their not infrequent truth -- a truth condensed and pointed by the limited sphere of his view -- gave a raciness to his talk which mere worldliness and general cultivation would at once have destroyed . Sometimes we would discuss the respective merits of the various qualities of marble , numerous slabs of which were resting against the walls of the shop , or sometimes an hour or two would pass quietly without a word on either side while I watched how neatly his chisel struck out letter after letter of the names of the Nortons , the Mayhews , the Luces , the Daggets , and other immemorial families of the Vineyard . Often with an artist 's pride the good old sculptor would speak of favorite productions of his skill which were scattered throughout the village graveyards of New England . But my chief and most instructive amusement was to witness his interviews with his customers , who held interminable consultations about the form and fashion of the desired monuments , the buried excellence to be commemorated , the anguish to be expressed , and finally the lowest price in dollars and cents for which a marble transcript of their feelings might be obtained . Really , my mind received many fresh ideas which perhaps may remain in it even longer than Mr. Wigglesworth 's hardest marble will retain the deepest strokes of his chisel . An elderly lady came to bespeak a monument for her first love , who had been killed by a whale in the Pacific Ocean no less than forty years before . It was singular that so strong an impression of early feeling should have survived through the changes of her subsequent life , in the course of which she had been a wife and a mother , and , so far as I could judge , a comfortable and happy woman . Reflecting within myself , it appeared to me that this lifelong sorrow -- as , in all good faith , she deemed it -- was one of the most fortunate circumstances of her history . It had given an ideality to her mind ; it had kept her purer and less earthy than she would otherwise have been by drawing a portion of her sympathies apart from earth . Amid the throng of enjoyments and the pressure of worldly care and all the warm materialism of this life she had communed with a vision , and had been the better for such intercourse . Faithful to the husband of her maturity , and loving him with a far more real affection than she ever could have felt for this dream of her girlhood , there had still been an imaginative faith to the ocean-buried ; so that an ordinary character had thus been elevated and refined . Her sighs had been the breath of Heaven to her soul . The good lady earnestly desired that the proposed monument should be ornamented with a carved border of marine plants interwined with twisted sea-shells , such as were probably waving over her lover 's skeleton or strewn around it in the far depths of the Pacific . But , Mr. Wigglesworth 's chisel being inadequate to the task , she was forced to content herself with a rose hanging its head from a broken stem . After her departure I remarked that the symbol was none of the most apt .
`` And yet , '' said my friend the sculptor , embodying in this image the thoughts that had been passing through my own mind , `` that broken rose has shed its sweet smell through forty XXXXX of the good woman 's life . ''
Daggets Providence day enjoyments girlhood hour quaintness slabs whale years