From love by natural sequence to death. Where is the Park Street
? A hundred gharriwans leap from their boxes and invade the market, and after a short struggle one of them uncarts his capture in a burial-ground—a ghastly new place, close to a tramway. This is not what is wanted. The living dead are here—the people whose names are not yet altogether perished and whose tombstones are tended. “Where are the old dead?” “Nobody goes there,” says the gharriwan. “It is up that road.” He points up a long and
thoroughfare, running between high walls. This is the place, and the entrance to it, with its mallee waiting with one brown,
rose, its
door and its professional notices, bears a
to the entrance of Simla churchyard. But, once inside, the sightseer stands in the heart of utter desolation—all the more forlorn for being swept up. Lower Park Street cuts a great
in two. The guide-books will tell you when the place was opened and when it was closed. The eye is ready to swear that it is as old as Herculaneum and Pompeii. The tombs are small houses. It is as though we walked down the streets of a town, so tall
they and so closely do they stand—a town shrivelled by fire, and scarred by frost and siege. They must have been afraid of their friends rising up before the due time that they weighted them with such cruel
of
. Strong man, weak woman, or somebody’s “infant son
fifteen months”—it is all the same. For each the
, the defaced classic temple, the cellaret of chunam, or the candlestick of brickwork—the heavy
, the rust-eaten railings, the whopper-jawed
and the
angels. Men were rich in those days and could afford to put a hundred cubic feet of masonry into the grave of even so
a person as “Jno. Clements, Captain of the Country Service, 1820.” When the “dearly beloved” had held rank answering to that of
, the efforts are still more
and the verse.... Well, the following speaks for itself:
“Soft on thy tomb shall fond Remembrance shed
The warm yet unavailing tear,
And purple flowers that deck the honored dead
Shall
the loved and honored bier.”
Failure to comply with the contract does not, let us hope,
of the earnest-money; or the honored dead might be grieved. The slab is out of his tomb, and leans foolishly against it; the railings are rotted, and there are no more
than
and stains, which are the work of the weather, and not the result of the “warm yet unavailing tear.” The eyes that promised to shed them have been closed any time these seventy years.
Let us go about and moralize cheaply on the tombstones, trailing the robe of
reflection up and down the pathways of the grave. Here is a big and stately tomb sacred to “Lucia,” who died in 1776 A.D., aged 23. Here also be verses which an irreverent thumb can bring to light. Thus they wrote, when their hearts were heavy in them, one hundred and sixteen years ago:
“What needs the
, what the
strain,
What all the arts that sculpture e’er expressed,
To tell the treasure that these walls contain?
Let those declare it most who knew her best.
“The tender pity she would oft display
Shall be with interest at her
returned,
love, connubial tears repay,
And Lucia loved shall still be Lucia mourned.
“Though closed the lips, though stopped the tuneful breath,
The silent, clay-cold monitress shall teach—
In all the alarming
of death
With double
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