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 years of the good woman 's life . '' It was seldom that I could find such pleasant food for contemplation as in the above instance . None of the applicants , I think , affected me more disagreeably than an old man who came , with his fourth wife hanging on his arm , to bespeak gravestones for the three former occupants of his marriage-bed . I watched with some anxiety to see whether his remembrance of either were more affectionate than of the other two , but could discover no symptom of the kind . The three monuments were all to be of the same material and form , and each decorated in bas-relief with two weeping willows , one of these sympathetic trees bending over its fellow , which was to be broken in the midst and rest upon a sepulchral urn .
This , indeed , was Mr. XXXXX 's standing emblem of conjugal bereavement .
Daggets Wigglesworth enjoyments first fourth girlhood hour quaintness whale worldliness