of inventions. Now we have our Gothic churches, without a particle of English, from the foundation to the crosses, and they so highly elevated that they are either intended to frown down Heaven, or be out of sight of the ordinarily faithful. I fearfully believe, that at some future day, (at the pace the present age goes,) that the emblems of faith, however small, will be placed so far out of human sight, that telescopic vision will be barely able to investigate, and they may possibly be mistaken for the tail of some near comet. Go on, mortality, build churches; for it is by them, as the bard says, that a great man may outlive his memory!

I had almost forgotten Hans, and fallen naturally into the error, that I condemned in others. He was a smallbodied man, as was before declared, and was given freely, as is said, (I wash my hands of the scandal,) to an indulgence in Schnap. He drank only at dinner, but the sly rogue, to dodge the effect of temperance laws, lunched every hour throughout the day, and called them dinners; this was beating the devil around the stump with a vengeance, which was not the only way this little man served that mysterious fellow. Hans at last took it into his head to die; or, possibly, it struck him, as some ideas frequently strike men; at any rate the conclusion was he died, as everybody thought, though nobody could assign a reason. He was called a good man by some, an upright man by all, and one evidently under spiritual influence, but he died— suddenly; like a flash, quick as a solitary drop of schnap finds its way out of an unstopped bottle, so did the spirit of Hans wend its way out of his little heap of rubbish. He was inserted in the earth, after the fashion of those days, and left to take whichever way he would. He was buried i the old French church-yard, by direction left in his will, for the reason that he could not bear to be out of sight of the hump-backed edifice on the other side.

CHAPTER III.

HANS's reverend opinions of Epitaphs, together with some few hap-hazard comments, which are not aimed as a shaft, either at dead or alive.

! Epitaphs are a sort of stucco plastered over one's faults when he is dead, a damning with faint praise. 'Tis said scandal trips up the heels of good reputations, and, like a blight or mildew, prevents character from ripening. It is a notorious villain, with a mouth black as pitch, and as defiling. May Heaven send all men deliverance from a plague like this. Famine can be endured: that injures alone the body; disease is moderate, but scandal is a viper that crawls over the tender surface of reputation and leaves its sting within to engender its poison; its aim is at both body and soul. To call a base man virtuous is a

scandal upon society.

Hans considered epitaphs, in many cases, as a doctor who arrives at the house of a patient after he is dead, and though convinced-yet he feels for the pulsation. Epitaphs blind the ignorant, though they frequently proceed from a heart that can send forth blessings and cursings.

Hans knew this, and directed that not only no epitaph should be written, but no tomb-stone mark the place where he was buried.

"I despise epitaphs," he said, "because they appear like informing heaven of what heaven knows better; giving a letter of credit to a world where anything mortal has no value; a superstitious vanity that some men have of thinking themselves honest, good and upright, when they are rogues by nature, evil as they could be, horizontal in their conscience. They are, in fine, solemn mocke

ries, often deliberate falsehoods, in which even the chiseller and poet are made accomplices.

"Epitaphs and the villagers never agree; no graveyard contains one, in the truth of which the country is unanimous; and therefore that scandal may not blur mine for speaking falsely, let me have none, for it cannot make one hair white or black."

There is much truth and good sense in the words of Hans. I was perambulating in the grave-yard of a country village hard by; at every grave was raised its marble, some gorgeous, some simple; on every slab an epitaph; the inmates of these tombs had been all that heaven ever designed man should be-they were all perfect. I could not withhold a remark from a villager, that his village must have been a most delightful place to produce so many good and virtuous. He replied, half smiling, "I have no doubt that many of these departed would desire that heaven would re-echo their epitaphs as truth. man who lies yonder under the slab that towers in vanity above the rest, defiled his neighbor's wife. This one, all love and purity, was the most corrupt swearer of the vil lage. That one earned his great wealth from the hard hands of the poor; yet all were enumerated with the upright. There is none that doeth good and sinneth not. Every man is pure in his own eyes, and virtuous only when beyond the opportunity to sin, by thought, word or deed. The grave hushes the lips of scandal; the grave is virtuous, for in it there is no device."

That

Hans felt satisfied that humility was better than pride, so adopted the course we have shown, and the world owes much to him for the example; though in spite of Hans and his virtue, epitaphs will be just as plenty, because poetry is still beloved: men must speak well of themselves though they be dead-they think their glory will descend after them.

CHAPTER IV.

A meandering account of the OLD DUTCH CHURCH, familiar. ly botanizing some old shrubbery by the way side, plucked according to fancy; together with a few chronological jumps from present to future and back again.

Hans faithfully attended the old Dutch Church, owned a bible and psalm-book in Dutch, sang and prayed in Dutch; from the sole of his foot to the tip of his tongue he was sound Dutch. He was a useful member of the community, for on Sundays he worshiped with a long pole, armed with which, he defied the attacks of the world, the flesh and the devil; or rather, deeming himself well-guarded against these enemies of his race, when he saw [them attack any of the members of the congregation in the disguise of a sleep, he beat off the enemy, by rapping on that part of their casement where Somnus reposes; this proceeding, being attractive to those inclined to sleep, kept them wide awake; reminding them that their eyes, as watchmen faithful to their charge, should be continually at their watch "to keep out great nature's second course." By this means there were few who sinned in their sleep, and little snoring was heard except from those who went asleep, as it were by steam, and organized into a snore immediately, and who neither feared Hans nor his pole; whose heads, hard as the rock, defied to their utmost, the beatings and peltings of a storm dreadful as Hans. The sermons

in those days were poured out from sun to sun; but were always listened to with pleasure, by those who could well understand Dutch. In a bye corner was canopied a sitting for the corporation, and not unfrequently was he obliged to caution them of an attack of the adversary. This mark

to the fathers was an act of especial favor; for, let it be understood, that the man a Dutchman singles out to honor, must be one exalted in station and virtue. You would rarely find the Zuyderzeeans of those days, yielding the slightest encouragement to vice and immorality.

In these days, the more vice a man has, the more he is respected and honored, (as it seems,) provided he is rich and cunning enough, to creep under the meshes of the law. Then, a good, old-fashioned Hollander would know a rogue a mile off, look into his heart and cipher him out easily as the rudiments of mathematics; every man was a simple sum, and a little Dutch addition settled him for better or worse.

A shake of an Holland head expressed as much as a dictionary spread out into an oration. There was something terrific about it, something that bade you look out, and prepare for the worst. Besides, there were numerous ways of shaking the head: one meant good humor and cheerfulness; another an emphatic yes or no ; another "Old boy, 1 know you; " and the latter was as significant to a sinner as the rattling of a ghost's bones at midnight in a grave-yard; it would make one's soul sneak within him and run divers ways to dodge his mortality. A Dutchman was to the moral what the sun is to the natural world, a perfect regulator, a landmark lifted up on high for precepts and examples, a guide-board to all the virtues. Pandora's box contained the evils flesh is heir to! (Heaven grant they may soon be boxed up again.) A Dutchman's heart is the antiPandora, for it contains all the virtues, and he is in them a complete monopolist, trading in no other commodity.

It may be, Hans was not one of this sort, but the town thought so, and the town's thought ensures any man Christian burial, a few lines of poetry, and a slab to put them on. He was, as I have said, addicted to schnap. It must however be recollected that schnap is numbered among Hol