"Chippings with a Chisel" finds Hawthorne conversing with an old graveyard monument maker. There are anecdotes and reflections, some amusing, some more compassionate.
Specimen of the amusing:
---It was seldom that I could find such pleasant food for contemplation
as in the above instance. None of the applicants [prospective customers], I think, affected
me more disagreeably than an old man who came, with his fourth wife
hanging on his arm, to bespeak gravestones for the three former
occupants of his marriage-bed. I watched with some anxiety to see
whether his remembrance of either were more affectionate than of the
other two, but could discover no symptom of the kind. The three
monuments were all to be of the same material and form, and each
decorated, in bas-relief, with two weeping-willows, one of these
sympathetic trees bending over its fellow, which was to be broken in
the midst and rest upon a sepulchral urn. This, indeed, was Mr.
Wigglesworth’s standing emblem of conjugal bereavement. I shuddered
at the gray polygamist, who had so utterly lost the holy sense of
individuality in wedlock, that methought he was fain to reckon upon
his fingers how many women, who had once slept by his side, were now
sleeping in their graves. There was even--if I wrong him it is no
great matter--a glance sidelong at his living spouse, as if he were
inclined to drive a thriftier bargain by bespeaking four gravestones
in a lot.---
A compassionate comment:
---The mother and daughter talked a long while with Mr.
Wigglesworth about a suitable epitaph, and finally chose an ordinary
verse of ill-matched rhymes, which had already been inscribed upon
innumerable tombstones. But, when we ridicule the triteness of
monumental verses, we forget that Sorrow reads far deeper in them than
we can, and finds a profound and individual purport in what seems so
vague and inexpressive, unless interpreted by her. She makes the
epitaph anew, though the self-same words may have served for a
thousand graves.---
