The inscription upon it was full of significant blanks; they seemed an
interrogation of the destiny which governs man.
"Here lies Peter Merrick----" ran the unfinished scroll, "and his wife
who died----"
But ambitious Peter never lay there at all; for in his later prime,
with one flash of sharp desire to see the world, he went on a voyage to
the Banks, and was drowned. And his wife? The story grows somewhat
threadbare. She summoned his step-brother to settle the estate, and he,
a marble-cutter by trade, filled in the date of Peter's death with
letters English and illegible. In the process of their carving, the
widow stood by, hands folded under her apron from the midsummer sun.
The two got excellent well acquainted, and the stone-cutter prolonged
his stay. He came again in a little over a year, at Thanksgiving time,
and they were married. Which shows that nothing is certain in
life,--no, not the proprieties of our leaving it,--and that even there
we must walk softly, writing no boastful legend for time to annul.
At one period a certain quatrain had a great run in Tiverton; it was
the epitaph of the day. Noting how it overspread that stony soil, you
picture to yourself the modest pride of its composer; unless, indeed,
it had been copied from an older inscription in an English yard, and
transplanted through the heart and brain of some settler whose thoughts
were ever flitting back.
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