Night before last I had a singular dream. I seemed to be sitting on a
doorstep (in no particular city perhaps) ruminating, and the time of
night appeared to be about twelve or one o'clock. The weather was balmy
and delicious. There was no human sound in the air, not even a footstep.
There was no sound of any kind to emphasize the dead stillness, except
the occasional hollow barking of a dog in the distance and the fainter
answer of a further dog. Presently up the street I heard a bony
clack-clacking, and guessed it was the castanets of a serenading party.
In a minute more a tall skeleton, hooded, and half clad in a tattered and
moldy shroud, whose shreds were flapping about the ribby latticework of
its person, swung by me with a stately stride and disappeared in the gray
gloom of the starlight. It had a broken and worm-eaten coffin on its
shoulder and a bundle of something in its hand. I knew what the
clack-clacking was then; it was this party's joints working together,
and his elbows knocking against his sides as he walked. I may say I was
surprised. Before I could collect my thoughts and enter upon any
speculations as to what this apparition might portend, I heard another
one coming for I recognized his clack-clack. He had two-thirds of a
coffin on his shoulder, and some foot and head boards under his arm.
I mightily wanted, to peer under his hood and speak to him, but when he
turned and smiled upon me with his cavernous sockets and his projecting
grin as he went by, I thought I would not detain him. He was hardly gone
when I heard the clacking again, and another one issued from the shadowy
half-light. This one was bending under a heavy gravestone, and dragging
a shabby coffin after him by a string. When he got to me he gave me a
steady look for a moment or two, and then rounded to and backed up to me,
saying:
"Ease this down for a fellow, will you?"
I eased the gravestone down till it rested on the ground, and in doing so
noticed that it bore the name of "John Baxter Copmanhurst," with "May,
1839," as the date of his death. Deceased sat wearily down by me, and
wiped his os frontis with his major maxillary--chiefly from former habit
I judged, for I could not see that he brought away any perspiration.
"It is too bad, too bad," said he, drawing the remnant of the shroud
about him and leaning his jaw pensively on his hand. Then he put his
left foot up on his knee and fell to scratching his anklebone absently
with a rusty nail which he got out of his coffin.
"What is too bad, friend?"
"Oh, everything, everything. I almost wish I never had died."
"You surprise me. Why do you say this? Has anything gone wrong? What
is the matter?"
"Matter! Look at this shroud-rags. Look at this gravestone, all
battered up. Look at that disgraceful old coffin. All a man's property
going to ruin and destruction before his eyes, and ask him if anything is
wrong? Fire and brimstone!"
"Calm yourself, calm yourself," I said. "It is too bad-it is certainly
too bad, but then I had not supposed that you would much mind such
matters situated as you are."
"Well, my dear sir, I do mind them. My pride is hurt, and my comfort is
impaired--destroyed, I might say. I will state my case--I will put it to
you in such a way that you can comprehend it, if you will let me," said
the poor skeleton, tilting the hood of his shroud back, as if he were
clearing for action, and thus unconsciously giving himself a jaunty and
festive air very much at variance with the grave character of his
position in life--so to speak--and in prominent contrast with his
distressful mood.
"Proceed," said I.
"I reside in the shameful old graveyard a block or two above you here,
in this street--there, now, I just expected that cartilage would let go!-
-third rib from the bottom, friend, hitch the end of it to my spine with
a string, if you have got such a thing about you, though a bit of silver
wire is a deal pleasanter, and more durable and becoming, if one keeps it
polished--to think of shredding out and going to pieces in this way, just
on account of the indifference and neglect of one's posterity!"--and the
poor ghost grated his teeth in a way that gave me a wrench and a shiver
--for the effect is mightily increased by the absence of muffling flesh
and cuticle. "I reside in that old graveyard, and have for these thirty
years; and I tell you things are changed since I first laid this old
tired frame there, and turned over, and stretched out for a long sleep,
with a delicious sense upon me of being done with bother, and grief,
and anxiety, and doubt, and fear, forever and ever, and listening with
comfortable and increasing satisfaction to the sexton's work, from the
startling clatter of his first spadeful on my coffin till it dulled away
to the faint patting that shaped the roof of my new home-delicious! My!
I wish you could try it to-night!" and out of my reverie deceased fetched
me a rattling slap with a bony hand.
"Yes, sir, thirty years ago I laid me down there, and was happy. For it
was out in the country then--out in the breezy, flowery, grand old woods,
and the lazy winds gossiped with the leaves, and the squirrels capered
over us and around us, and the creeping things visited us, and the birds
filled the tranquil solitude with music. Ah, it was worth ten years of a
man's life to be dead then! Everything was pleasant. I was in a good
neighborhood, for all the dead people that lived near me belonged to the
best families in the city. Our posterity appeared to think the world of
us. They kept our graves in the very best condition; the fences were
always in faultless repair, head-boards were kept painted or whitewashed,
and were replaced with new ones as soon as they began to look rusty or
decayed; monuments were kept upright, railings intact and bright, the
rose-bushes and shrubbery trimmed, trained, and free from blemish, the
walks clean and smooth and graveled. But that day is gone by. Our
descendants have forgotten us. My grandson lives in a stately house
built with money made by these old hands of mine, and I sleep in a
neglected grave with invading vermin that gnaw my shroud to build them
nests withal! I and friends that lie with me founded and secured the
prosperity of this fine city, and the stately bantling of our loves
leaves us to rot in a dilapidated cemetery which neighbors curse and
strangers scoff at. See the difference between the old time and this
--for instance: Our graves are all caved in now; our head-boards have
rotted away and tumbled down; our railings reel this way and that, with
one foot in the air, after a fashion of unseemly levity; our monuments
lean wearily, and our gravestones bow their heads discouraged; there be
no adornments any more--no roses, nor shrubs, nor graveled walks, nor
anything that is a comfort to the eye; and even the paintless old board
fence that did make a show of holding us sacred from companionship with
beasts and the defilement of heedless feet, has tottered till it
overhangs the street, and only advertises the presence of our dismal
resting-place and invites yet more derision to it. And now we cannot
hide our poverty and tatters in the friendly woods, for the city has
stretched its withering arms abroad and taken us in, and all that remains
of the cheer of our old home is the cluster of lugubrious forest trees
that stand, bored and weary of a city life, with their feet in our
coffins, looking into the hazy distance and wishing they were there.
I tell you it is disgraceful!
"You begin to comprehend--you begin to see how it is. While our
descendants are living sumptuously on our money, right around us in the
city, we have to fight hard to keep skull and bones together. Bless you,
there isn't a grave in our cemetery that doesn't leak not one. Every
time it rains in the night we have to climb out and roost in the trees
and sometimes we are wakened suddenly by the chilly water trickling down
the back of our necks. Then I tell you there is a general heaving up of
old graves and kicking over of old monuments, and scampering of old
skeletons for the trees! Bless me, if you had gone along there some such
nights after twelve you might have seen as many as fifteen of us roosting
on one limb, with our joints rattling drearily and the wind wheezing
through our ribs! Many a time we have perched there for three or four
dreary hours, and then come down, stiff and chilled through and drowsy,
and borrowed each other's skulls to bail out our graves with--if you will
glance up in my mouth now as I tilt my head back, you can see that my
head-piece is half full of old dry sediment how top-heavy and stupid it
makes me sometimes! Yes, sir, many a time if you had happened to come
along just before the dawn you'd have caught us bailing out the graves
and hanging our shrouds on the fence to dry. Why, I had an elegant
shroud stolen from there one morning--think a party by the name of Smith
took it, that resides in a plebeian graveyard over yonder--I think so
because the first time I ever saw him he hadn't anything on but a check
shirt, and the last time I saw him, which was at a social gathering in
the new cemetery, he was the best-dressed corpse in the company--and it
is a significant fact that he left when he saw me; and presently an old
woman from here missed her coffin--she generally took it with her when
she went anywhere, because she was liable to take cold and bring on the
spasmodic rheumatism that originally killed her if she exposed herself to
the night air much. She was named Hotchkiss--Anna Matilda Hotchkiss--you
might know her? She has two upper front teeth, is tall, but a good deal
inclined to stoop, one rib on the left side gone, has one shred of rusty
hair hanging from the left side of her head, and one little tuft just
above and a little forward of her right ear, has her underjaw wired on
one side where it had worked loose, small bone of left forearm gone--lost
in a fight has a kind of swagger in her gait and a 'gallus' way of going
with: her arms akimbo and her nostrils in the air has been pretty free
and easy, and is all damaged and battered up till she looks like a
queensware crate in ruins--maybe you have met her?"
"God forbid!" I involuntarily ejaculated, for somehow I was not looking
for that form of question, and it caught me a little off my guard. But I
hastened to make amends for my rudeness, and say, "I simply meant I had
not had the honor--for I would not deliberately speak discourteously of a
friend of yours. You were saying that you were robbed--and it was a
shame, too--but it appears by what is left of the shroud you have on that
it was a costly one in its day. How did--"
A most ghastly expression began to develop among the decayed features and
shriveled integuments of my guest's face, and I was beginning to grow
uneasy and distressed, when he told me he was only working up a deep,
sly smile, with a wink in it, to suggest that about the time he acquired
his present garment a ghost in a neighboring cemetery missed one. This
reassured me, but I begged him to confine himself to speech thenceforth,
because his facial expression was uncertain. Even with the most
elaborate care it was liable to miss fire. Smiling should especially be
avoided. What he might honestly consider a shining success was likely to
strike me in a very different light. I said I liked to see a skeleton
cheerful, even decorously playful, but I did not think smiling was a
skeleton's best hold.
"Yes, friend," said the poor skeleton, "the facts are just as I have
given them to you. Two of these old graveyards--the one that I resided
in and one further along have been deliberately neglected by our
descendants of to-day until there is no occupying them any longer. Aside
from the osteological discomfort of it--and that is no light matter this
rainy weather--the present state of things is ruinous to property. We
have got to move or be content to see our effects wasted away and utterly
destroyed.
"Now, you will hardly believe it, but it is true, nevertheless, that there
isn't a single coffin in good repair among all my acquaintance--now that
is an absolute fact. I do not refer to low people who come in a pine box
mounted on an express-wagon, but I am talking about your high-toned,
silver-mounted burial-case, your monumental sort, that travel under black
plumes at the head of a procession and have choice of cemetery lots--
I mean folks like the Jarvises, and the Bledsoes and Burlings, and such.
They are all about ruined. The most substantial people in our set, they
were. And now look at them--utterly used up and poverty-stricken. One
of the Bledsoes actually traded his monument to a late barkeeper for some
fresh shavings to put under his head. I tell you it speaks volumes, for
there is nothing a corpse takes so much pride in as his monument. He
loves to read the inscription. He comes after a while to believe what it
says himself, and then you may see him sitting on the fence night after
night enjoying it. Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world
of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was
alive. I wish they were used more. Now I don't complain, but
confidentially I do think it was a little shabby in my descendants to
give me nothing but this old slab of a gravestone--and all the more that
there isn't a compliment on it. It used to have:
'GONE TO HIS JUST REWARD'
"on it, and I was proud when I first saw it, but by and by I noticed that
whenever an old friend of mine came along he would hook his chin on the
railing and pull a long face and read along down till he came to that,
and then he would chuckle to himself and walk off, looking satisfied and
comfortable. So I scratched it off to get rid of those fools. But a
dead man always takes a deal of pride in his monument. Yonder goes half
a dozen of the Jarvises now, with the family monument along. And
Smithers and some hired specters went by with his awhile ago. Hello,
Higgins, good-by, old friend! That's Meredith Higgins--died in '44--
belongs to our set in the cemetery--fine old family--great-grand mother
was an Injun--I am on the most familiar terms with him he didn't hear me
was the reason he didn't answer me. And I am sorry, too, because I would
have liked to introduce you. You would admire him. He is the most
disjointed, sway-backed, and generally distorted old skeleton you ever
saw, but he is full of fun. When he laughs it sounds like rasping two
stones together, and he always starts it off with a cheery screech like
raking a nail across a window-pane. Hey, Jones! That is old Columbus
Jones--shroud cost four hundred dollars entire trousseau, including
monument, twenty-seven hundred. This was in the spring of '26. It was
enormous style for those days. Dead people came all the way from the
Alleghanies to see his things--the party that occupied the grave next to
mine remembers it well. Now do you see that individual going along with
a piece of a head-board under his arm, one leg-bone below his knee gone,
and not a thing in the world on? That is Barstow Dalhousie, and next to
Columbus Jones he was the most sumptuously outfitted person that ever
entered our cemetery. We are all leaving. We cannot tolerate the
treatment we are receiving at the hands of our descendants. They open
new cemeteries, but they leave us to our ignominy. They mend the
streets, but they never mend anything that is about us or belongs to us.
Look at that coffin of mine--yet I tell you in its day it was a piece of
furniture that would have attracted attention in any drawing-room in this
city. You may have it if you want it--I can't afford to repair it.
Put a new bottom in her, and part of a new top, and a bit of fresh lining
along the left side, and you'll find her about as comfortable as any
receptacle of her species you ever tried. No thanks no, don't mention it
you have been civil to me, and I would give you all the property I have
got before I would seem ungrateful. Now this winding-sheet is a kind of
a sweet thing in its way, if you would like to--No? Well, just as you
say, but I wished to be fair and liberal there's nothing mean about me.
Good-by, friend, I must be going. I may have a good way to go to-night
--don't know. I only know one thing for certain, and that is that I am
on the emigrant trail now, and I'll never sleep in that crazy old
cemetery again. I will travel till I fiend respectable quarters, if I
have to hoof it to New Jersey. All the boys are going. It was decided
in public conclave, last night, to emigrate, and by the time the sun
rises there won't be a bone left in our old habitations. Such cemeteries
may suit my surviving friends, but they do not suit the remains that have
the honor to make these remarks. My opinion is the general opinion.
If you doubt it, go and see how the departing ghosts upset things before
they started. They were almost riotous in their demonstrations of
distaste. Hello, here are some of the Bledsoes, and if you will give me
a lift with this tombstone I guess I will join company and jog along with
them--mighty respectable old family, the Bledsoes, and used to always
come out in six-horse hearses and all that sort of thing fifty years ago
when I walked these streets in daylight. Good-by, friend."
And with his gravestone on his shoulder he joined the grisly procession,
dragging his damaged coffin after him, for notwithstanding he pressed it
upon me so earnestly, I utterly refused his hospitality. I suppose that
for as much as two hours these sad outcasts went clacking by, laden with
their dismal effects, and all that time I sat pitying them. One or two
of the youngest and least dilapidated among them inquired about midnight
trains on the railways, but the rest seemed unacquainted with that mode
of travel, and merely asked about common public roads to various towns
and cities, some of which are not on the map now, and vanished from it
and from the earth as much as thirty years ago, and some few of them
never had existed anywhere but on maps, and private ones in real-estate
agencies at that. And they asked about the condition of the cemeteries
in these towns and cities, and about the reputation the citizens bore as
to reverence for the dead.
This whole matter interested me deeply, and likewise compelled my
sympathy for these homeless ones. And it all seeming real, and I not
knowing it was a dream, I mentioned to one shrouded wanderer an idea that
had entered my head to publish an account of this curious and very
sorrowful exodus, but said also that I could not describe it truthfully,
and just as it occurred, without seeming to trifle with a grave subject
and exhibit an irreverence for the dead that would shock and distress
their surviving friends. But this bland and stately remnant of a former
citizen leaned him far over my gate and whispered in my ear, and said:
"Do not let that disturb you. The community that can stand such
graveyards as those we are emigrating from can stand anything a body can
say about the neglected and forsaken dead that lie in them."
At that very moment a cock crowed, and the weird procession vanished and
left not a shred or a bone behind. I awoke, and found myself lying with
my head out of the bed and "sagging" downward considerably--a position
favorable to dreaming dreams with morals in them, maybe, but not poetry.
NOTE.--The reader is assured that if the cemeteries in his town are kept
in good order, this Dream is not leveled at his town at all, but is
leveled particularly and venomously at the next town.