It is
nothing if not fantastic. Even by day that same mad grouping and jostling
of monumental devices, gathered together from the ends of the world,
gives to the place a cheerful half-pagan character; now, in its confusion
and immensity, it might be some city of dreams, tossed up in cloud and
foam and frozen into marble; some aerial half-way limbo where life slips
a little from the living and death from the dead.
For these have their own way here. No priest interferes with them, and
whatever secular power ordains these matters is indulgent to its
children. If one of them would have his horse or his dog carved on his
tomb instead of an angel, or a pair of compasses instead of a cross,
there is no one to thwart his fancy. He may even be humorous if he will.
It is as if he implored us to laugh with him a little while though the
jest be feeble, and not to chill him with so many tears.
At twilight a man and a woman were threading their way through this
cemetery, and as they went they smiled faintly at the memorial caprices
of the living and the still quainter originalities of the dead. But on
the whole they seemed to be trying not to look too happy. They said
nothing to each other till they came to a mound raised somewhere in the
borderland that divides the graves of the rich from the paupers' ground.
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