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choose some garden or orchard which they may have known and been fond of when they were young. They would fain avoid the loathsomeness and corruption of the grave, and enter into new forms of life and beauty as soon as possible. The superstitious hold that they whose ashes are scattered over any land become its jealous guardians from that time forward; and the living like to think that they shall become identified with this or that locality where they have once been happy. I dared not tell them our own system, for when I even began to hint at it they turned away from me in deep displeasure. Epitaphs are not only unknown to them, but utterly repugnant to all their tastes and feelings. There is no law against them, for people would no more set them up than they would try to fly; but they have another institution which comes to much the same thing, for the instinct of preserving the name alive after the death of the body seems to exist here as elsewhere. They have statues of themselves made while they are still alive (those, that is, who can afford it), and write inscriptions under them, which are often quite as untruthful as are our own epitaphs—only in another way. For they do not hesitate to describe themselves as victims to ill temper, jealousy, covetousness, and the like, but almost always lay claim to personal beauty, whether they have it or not. In fact, if a person is ugly he does not sit as a model for his own statue, although it bears his name. He gets the handsomest of his friends to sit for him, and one of the ways of paying a compliment to another is to ask him to sit for such a statue. The result is delightful. Health and beauty and strength are being thus con-