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 slabs of marble and full occupation in lettering and ornamenting them . He was an elderly man , a descendant of the old Puritan family of Wigglesworth , with a certain simplicity and singleness both of heart and mind which , methinks , is more rarely found among us Yankees than in any other community of people . 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 XXXXX .
Edgartown London Wigglesworth burial-ground century daily dauber hour-glasses labor mourner