One discovery, made there on a summer day, has not, I
fancy, been duplicated in another New England town. On six of the
larger tombstones are carved, below the grass level, a row of tiny
imps, grinning faces and humanized animals. Whose was the hand that
wrought? The Tivertonians know nothing about it. They say there was a
certain old Veasey who, some eighty odd years ago, used to steal into
the graveyard with his tools, and there, for love, scrape the mosses
from the stones and chip the letters clear. He liked to draw,
"creatur's" especially, and would trace them for children on their
slates. He lived alone in a little house long since fallen, and he
would eat no meat. That is all they know of him. I can guess but one
thing more: that when no looker-on was by, he pushed away the grass,
and wrote his little jokes, safe in the kindly tolerance of the dead.
This was the identical soul who should, in good old days, have been
carving gargoyles and misereres; here his only field was the obscurity
of Tiverton churchyard, his only monument these grotesqueries so
cunningly concealed.
We have epitaphs, too,--all our own as yet, for the world has not
discovered them. One couple lies in well-to-do respectability under a
tiny monument not much taller than the conventional gravestone, but
shaped on a pretentious model.
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