THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaultshave a resemblance to houses--sometimes to temples; are builtof marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely;they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when onemoves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees theirwhite roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand,the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him.

Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order.

When one goes from the levee or the business streets near it,to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down therewould live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead,they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter wouldbe the wonder and admiration of the business world. Fresh flowers,in vases of water, are to be seen at the portals of many of the vaults:

placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and children,husbands and wives, and renewed daily. A milder form of sorrow findsits inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and uglybut indestructible 'immortelle'--which is a wreath or cross or somesuch emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellowrosette at the conjunction of the cross's bars--kind of sorrowfulbreast-pin, so to say. The immortelle requires no attention:

you just hang it up, and there you are; just leave it alone, it will takecare of your grief for you, and keep it in mind better than you can;stands weather first-rate, and lasts like boiler-iron.

On sunny days, pretty little chameleons--gracefullest of legged reptiles--creep along the marble fronts of the vaults, and catch flies. Their changesof color--as to variety--are not up to the creature's reputation.

They change color when a person comes along and hangs up an immortelle;but that is nothing: any right-feeling reptile would do that.

I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have beentrying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it,but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinelysentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible.

Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages,when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground,to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the air withdisease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must diebefore their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now,when even the children know that a dead saint enters upona century-long career of assassination the moment the earthcloses over his corpse. It is a grim sort of a thought.

The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have now, after nineteenhundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen.

But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics,within a generation after St. Anne's death and burial,MADE several thousand people sick. Therefore thesemiracle-performances are simply compensation, nothing more.

St. Anne is somewhat slow pay, for a Saint, it is true;but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years,and outlawed by the statute of limitations, than not paid at all;and most of the knights of the halo do not pay at all.

Where you find one that pays--like St. Anne--you finda hundred and fifty that take the benefit of the statute.

And none of them pay any more than the principal of what they owe--they pay none of the interest either simple or compound.

A Saint can never QUITE return the principal, however;for his dead body KILLS people, whereas his relics HEAL only--they never restore the dead to life. That part of the account isalways............