And there in Boston the falsifying old headstones still stand, fixed in new places, but marking no coffins or honored bones beneath; the only true words of their inscriptions being the opening ones "Here lies," and the motto that they repeat derisively to each other--"As you are now so once was I."
In many communities each family had its own burying-place in some corner of the home farm, sometimes at the foot of garden or orchard. Such is noticeably the case throughout Narragansett; almost every farm has a grave-yard, now generally unused and deserted. Sometimes the burying-place is enclosed by a high mossy stone wall, often it is overgrown with dense sombre firs or hemlocks, or half shaded with airy locust-trees. Beautifully ideal and touching is the thought of these old Narragansett planters resting with their wives and children in the ground they so dearly loved and so faithfully worked for.
A vast similarity of design existed in the early gravestones. Originality of inscription, carving, size, or material was evidently frowned upon as frivolous, undignified, and eccentric--even disrespectful. A few of the early settlers used freestone or sienite, or a native porphyritic green stone called beech-bowlder. Sandstone was rarely employed, for though easily carved, it as easily yielded to New England frosts and storms. A hard, dark, flinty slate-stone from North Wales was commonly used, a stone so hard and so enduring that when our modern granite and marble monuments are crumbled in the dust I believe these old slate headstones still will speak their warning words of many centuries.
"As I am now so you shall be, Prepare for Death & follow me."
These stones were imported from England ready carved. A high duty was placed on them, and a Boston sea captain endeavored and was caught in the attempt to bring into port, free of duty, for one of his friends, one of these carved slate gravestones, by entering it as a winding-sheet. It is one of the curiosities of New England commercial enterprises, that for many years gravestones should have been imported to New England, a land that fairly bristles with stone and rock thrusting itself through the earth and waiting to be carved.