snug little railed-in garden, or in an Egyptian vaulted tomb. You go and take your family to see the place now and then on a Sunday, and if you like, you can have a key to the garden railing if you wish to plant everlasting flowers or other sentimentalities.

Let me take three representative cities, and describe the cemeteries in each of them. I will select New York, Philadelphia, and Savannah; the first the commercial capital of America, the second the Quaker city, the third a flourishing city of Georgia, with a population of sixteen thousand whites and twelve thousand blacks.

Let me begin with Greenwood Cemetery, at New York, the most fashionable of all the burying-places in that bustling city. It is situated in the south part of Brooklyn, about three miles from the New York and Brooklyn Ferries. This cemetery was incorporated in eighteen hundred and thirty-eight, and contains two hundred and forty-two acres of land, about one-half of which is covered with wood of a natural growth. The admittance is free, except on Sundays, when only the owners of lots or the possessors of vaults are supposed to obtain admittance; but I generally found that twenty-five cents would go a great way to wards obtaining you an entrance.

You reach the cemetery through dusty and rather desolate roads, past countless villas, raw gardens, new lots, new shops, and new cottages, all very new things. The neighbourhood here is rather famous for low fevers, and a more apt place for Death's garden could scarcely have been chosen. The ground was swampy, unused, therefore unwholesome and cheap. The ground undulates and runs up and down hills, from the top of which you have fine views of the sea, therefore it attracts visitors; who make a park and promenade of it, and go home with better relish to their green turtle soup and their other "fixings." The ground, too, was naturally wooded, and boasted of a small lake, that would do for inconsolable weeping-willows and rippling little fountains; "above all," said the proprietor, "it is not too far from New York city." It is a pleasure to think of resting in such a pretty place as Greenwood Cemetery.

But let me enter it properly. I pass under a great prosaic Greek gateway, after diplomacy with the porter. I descended to this gateway by a long flight of steps from the roadway above. I feel as if I were in a deserted zoological garden, or a parvenu's park, in which the trees were still sapling and parvenu too. Melancholy sallow people walk about in groups; nankeencoloured ladies, over-dressed, in hideous caricature crinoline and strange French bonnets arching up over their heads-ladies who wear a look of true American contempt for the sturdier sex, and who wring service from men by whom it would be only too readily paid. The men carry ivory-knobbed canes of extreme size, and wear ill-fitting creasy black clothes; their hats are generally of the wide-awake species, which gives them a rustic and mechanic air to my prejudiced eye. The children are stiff little crea

tures, prematurely old and sallow, too self-confident and bold to please me, and dressed rather in the French manner.

A stranger would soon lose himself in two hundred and odd acres of winding walks, lawns, flower-beds, grassy hills, and iron paled gardens were it not for notices everywhere stuck up, indicating the direction of "the tour," or chief circuit, which leads you by all the principal tombs, graves, and points of view.

Some people have a horror of damp graves; others of city churchyards; others of deep-sea interment; others of lying unburied altogether on desert island or foreign shore; but there are few who would not, if they could choose, choose such a peaceful place as Greenwood Cemetery, where the great companionship of dead gives a sense of fellowship, sad but not painful. There is no jarring noise of life: no grind of wheel, recalling the pain and travail of existence; not even the murmur of the distant sea, or the low breathing of the distant city; its roar being softened here to a whisper. Sea and city are both too far away. The grog-shop, the railway station, the euker-table, Lime-streetall that troubled these sleepers when alive-are put away from them by Death, as the nurse puts away the toys from a fractious child.

Even the tomb has its conceits, its prides, and vanities. Look at these great Egyptian mausoleums, complete houses; the door sometimes half ajar, sometimes hermetically sealed, with now and then a fringe of everlasting flowers, an American eagle, or trite patriotism and sentiment that ape true feeling.

Death, too, can be vulgar. Look at this hideous batch of iron tombstones of the Twigg family, girt in with a rail of iron balls and spikes. Look, too, at the vulgar Twigg flower-bedsthe great obtrusive sun-flowers, and big, staring, rhubarb-coloured dahlias. Presently I come to something worse than even the Twigg obelisk a frightful statue of a New York pilot, carved in stone, in the costume in which he lived. The poor creature, Man, struggling to win fame, makes his last great effort in the churchyard, carving his name and epitaph, and lying down with it over him, like a thick stone blanket, to keep out the cold; then comes Time, the great enemy, and with an impatient sneer, rubs out the record, and the sleeper is henceforth forgotten, except by his good deeds, which still blossom over his dust, and bear fruit, and scatter their seed of gratitude and memory.

I sometimes fancy myself in a tea-garden labyrinth, as I occasionally lose my way and meet bands of laughing people who have lost their way also, and are seeking help from one of those curators with white wands, who wander about the death gardens like insane showmen, who have had their shows stolen. Now I am hushed and soothed into reverence by a train of mourners, with a clergyman at their head, entering one of the little gardens on that hill yonder-the rosiest of them, too-and a curator whispers to me that that is the funeral of EPHRAIM PEPPERNET,

the infant son of the great toy-seller in Twentythird-street. The Peppernets have had land here for twenty years, and many a Pepperne lies here.

myself in England on an autumn morning. The old lady, too, at the gate, was as neat, grave, and respectful as her prototype would have been in England. The first look at the cemetery was not But I have to visit Savannah and Philadel- favourable; a coarse and staring piece of sculpphia, so I must not tarry more than half a dozen ture in sandstone, "by the celebrated Thom," lines longer in Greenwood Cemetery. I must seemed to me painfully out of place. What leave its winding walks, its town of tombs, its have Sir Walter Scott and Old Mortality got to ocean views, its peaceful colonies of dead, its do with this solemn death garden? This is not willows and flower-beds, even its rude uncared- an exhibition place, and we do not want mere for burial-place for strangers and paupers, with- sights obtruded on us. I left the vulgar sandout tombstone or record even of name-unwept, stone figures, and pushed forward up the hilly uncared-for, unknelled, and perhaps unpitied. walk, where the flowers bloomed thickest Philadelphia is a city so different from New and the trees grew strongest. The tawdry York that we might well expect its cemetery Gothic chapel, with "its immense window of to be different too. The Quaker city has its stained glass," may be very interesting to Amestreets intersecting each other at right angles.rican visitors, but it had no charm to me, who In New York, the streets are known by num- have seen real cathedrals, and spent months and bers, as One Hundred and Twenty-second-street, years under their very shadow. Yet I could Fifth avenue, and so forth; in Philadelphia, they not help reflecting that it is better to sleep in are known by the names of trees, as Chesnut- these flowery hills or in these wooded dells, than street, Sycamore-street, Vine-street. Through in sordid city graveyards, where sooty nettles all of these the street railroad runs with admi- choke the blanched tombstone, and mist scurfs rable ease and success. the purgatorial railings."

New York is a French Liverpool. Philadel phia has a sober Quaker splendour about it. It has not the fitful climate of New York, nor the brisk sea breeze, nor the fine sea views or splendid park of its restless rival; nor the gigantic marble hotels, nor the grand squares, but it still has some very beautiful features of its own. For instance, nearly all the houses, except the very humblest, have the basement story coated with purest white marble, which is washed every week, so that on Sunday the city appears as in a clean robe of dazzling whiteness. The architectural characteristic of Philadelphia is Greco-Dutch; as a French Liverpudlianism is of New York. The Babylonian rectangular streets, the old houses, the sombre squares, where the children feed the tame grey squirrels, all contribute to the quaint beauty of the old Quaker city. The Laurel Hill cemetery is one of the most beautiful burial-places in the world. It is situated on the Ridge-road, three miles and a half north-west of the city. I went there by street railroad, along a suburban road, till I reached the steep wooded cliff overhanging the pretty river Schuylkill, over which the garden of death is laid out. I passed, on the outskirts of the city, that beautiful Grecian building of pure white marble, the Girard College, founded by a French gentleman, one Stephen Girard, who died in 1831. The Corinthian pillars of fluted marble have a grace about them and a tender beauty that any pure white marble in a spotless atmosphere could anywhere possess.

"Laurel Hill!" cries the conductor of the street railroad car, and I descended and entered Death's wenty acre garden. The lodge, shaded by trees and of a blank insipid sort of architecture, reminded me strongly of the lodge at a country gentleman's park gate in England. The raked gravel, with here and there pools of turbid orange-coloured water, the sun after the recent showers glittering on the wet brown and yellow sycamore leaves, all made me fancy

Now I passed beautiful little plots of flowers, among which the autumn dahlia tosses its crimson bosses of blossom, or under plane-trees, whose red and yellow leaves are glorious even in their decay. Then I reached the highest ground in the cemetery, beyond the last ironfenced tomb, the last garden plot. I was in Death's fallow ground, and natural woods rose beyond me. I should have been alone, but for two gardeners, who were rolling up turf into bundles. I looked over a low stone wall down upon the river and the fair hills of the Schuylkill.

The beauty of the morning was upon everything. The river gleamed and flashed as it flowed on. A train slid along the distant railwaybridge. Boys played on the opposite bank. The cottages below were like toy houses, yet real smoke rose from their chimneys, and real mothers played with real children at the doorways. Beautiful were the autumn trees, with their variegated plumes, like files of Indians in a war party. I forgot that I was in a cemetery. I felt inclined to whoop and halloa to the passing train, that noisily blurted its smoky breath as it glided silently far under me.

A long leap and I am in a Southern city, where the population is as nearly as possible half white and half black. I am, in fact, in Savannah, on the shores of an alligator-haunted river, in the largest city of Georgia, the region of rice-fields and Sea-Island cotton, and a special haunt of the yellow fever.

I have seen all the lions of the strange, gloomy, and silent city, whose streets are all avenues, and whose roadway returns no sound to foot or hoof; whose deserted squares were sombre with large China trees, and whose houses were dreary, quiet, and blinded. I am bound to the cemetery, not the lonely raw new one on the great sandy plain outside the city, where the pride-of-India trees trail over the graves, but the

famous cemetery of Bonaventure. It is on the banks of the Warsaw river, and was formerly an old estate of the Tatnall family. The Tatnall tomb, the first of this great army of tombs now to be seen, was shown to me by one of the curators. These broad avenues, ankle-deep in sand, that now I tread, were the avenues of the old estate ere Death had taken possession.

These avenues of huge live oaks, whose boughs mingle overhead, have great lateral arms that are weighed down by grey festoons of Spanish moss. In vast hoary beards, the moss trails on the ground. It is as if rows of primeval giants had been turned to mournful trees, and their beards only were left to show that they had once been human; amid these avenues crop up the tombstones, like so many leaves from the Book of Man's Life, plucked out by Death.

In the Cemetery of Bonaventure, we no more think of the New Country-of its garish novelties, its hasty wonders, its unfinished marvels; we feel that we are face to face in a solemn spot with the old enemy-we are fronting the old, dreadful, and incontrovertible fact. The same in every country, and with every race; we are here in the very presence-chamber of King Death.

AGRICULTURAL ENCAMPMENTS.

wheel that sets the faces of thousands and tens of thousands at least once in the year towards Epsom Downs and Doncaster town, would soon stand still.

The Royal Agricultural Society of England is, perhaps, in this respect, as curious an example as any of the manners and customs of the English people; not the least like the Scotch, whose feudal tastes induce them to leave their great society to the management of titled amateurs and an imperial despotic secretary. Although called royal by virtue of its charter, royalty has had as little to do with the success of the Royal Agricultural Society as the government has to do with its management, a royal prince paying his subscription on the same terins as other subscribers, enters his live stock, and loses and wins in his turn in competition with breeders of every degree, from singing Somersetshire to broad Yorkshire-plain farmers, who measure every pound of oil-cake, and wealthy squires, whose prize-winning pigs munch rosy apples and breakfast off rum and milk. Cabinet ministers neither enact the society's rules, nor present medals from the national treasury; and lord-lieutenants and chairmen of quarter-sessions, unlike the awful and gracious préfets and sous-préfets on the other side the Channel, only appear in the society's public ceremonies in their quality as landowners, or as farmers, as hosts, or as guests.

ENGLAND affords the most remarkable examples in Europe of success in voluntary asso- Frenchmen and Germans, accustomed to see ciations, which, without the assistance of the agricultural societies treated much as we treat money, or the power, or the honorary rewards harbours of refuge and lighthouses, for inof government, do work which, in other coun- stance-directed by a minister of state, suptries, is considered the special department of ported by government funds, and presided over official power. The most successful of these at festivals and feasts by some high and mighty associations combine with some national object much-bestarred and be-ribboned official, a coma little amusement and a good deal of business. bination of a viceroy and a chief policemanWe cannot get up the picturesque, enthusiastic, are as much puzzled as astonished when they artistic festivals with which our German and come to examine the internal economy and Flemish neighbours celebrate historical or bio-management of the world-famous Royal Agrigraphical events. The first Shakespeare jubilee at Stratford-on-Avon was a very artificial affair, and the attempts to make it periodical were as miserable failures as Covent Garden masquerades. Those rustic dancing festivals, which in France under the name of Ducasse and Rackrow, form the delight of every village, and a crowd of town visitors, are out of the question in England, and even dancing feasts in Ireland are, or were, usually based on a cattle fair, and worked out with whisky. Our London population, of late years, seems to be re-learning to amuse themselves, but that is more in a clubbable, personal manner than at regular times and seasons. The greatest metropolitan feast is that of a benefit society with a fancy name and fancy costumes to match, where life assurance, a sick and funeral funds, are the excuse for the plea

sure.

Our Derby and Doncaster St. Leger days, and all our minor race-course gatherings, are no exceptions to the rule that mere amusement will not afford a solid axle for any great round of English excitement in England. Take away the money business of the turf, and the great

cultural Society, which is founded on the principle of letting every one concerned have his own way as much as possible. Indeed, this society is full of anomalies, and strikingly illustrates the illogical character of a nation which, according to high French philosophical authority, has succeeded in the race of empire contrary to every rule of political philosophy. England, like the maid-servant fencing with her master in Molière's comedy, hits the mark, although she thrusts in carte when she ought to thrust in tierce.

According to the theory of the charter which makes it royal, the first object of the Society is "to promote the science and practice of agriculture," yet the most prominent members of its council, and the majority of its presidents, know as little of either as a man can who owns great estates and rides fox-hunting at some time of his life. For membership, the only qualification is an undertaking to pay the annual subscription. With an income of some ten thousand pounds a year, there is no museum, no library worthy of the name, and no expenditure on scientific investigations beyond a few hundred

pounds grudgingly devoted to the labour of a professor of chemistry, whose zeal fortunately is not measured by his official income. Out of six thousand members, five hundred have never been gathered together at one time, in one place. The prizes given during two-and-twenty annual shows on agricultural implements, have very often been either mistakes when awarded Three-and-twenty years have passed away to novelties, or tardy endorsements of established since a party of noblemen breeders, like the agricultural experience-like Lord Chesterfield's Duke of Richmond, Earls Spencer and Ducie, patronage of Johnson's Dictionary - when al- and Lord Western; active farming squires, lotted to practical utilities. The prizes for live like Henry Handley, Philip Pusey, and Thomas stock have steadily encouraged the exhibition of Gisborne; and two agricultural authors, Wilanimals too fat to breed, and too costly to eat-liam Youatt and William Shaw, all dead now, the admiration of the ignorant, and the despair associated with others, still living, who owed of the purchasers.

education of the eye the value of the best live stock, and the best agricultural machinery. Not taught by the Council, but teaching each, the farmers of England have realised all that was practicable in the aims of the founders of the Royal Society. In a word, they have been enabled to do a good deal for themselves; and that, in England, is the spirit of our social as well as of our political institutions.

machine-a machine which at the present day is as common as a roasting-jack. Mention was made of the implements of manufacturers who have since attained an European reputation-Howard's ploughs, Garrett's drills, and Gardner's turnip slicer; but, curiously enough, of the four implements specially rewarded by silver medals, not one remains in use, and two, if not three, never came into commercial demand at all.

We shall presently contrast this accidental exhibition of implements with the last greatest display at Leeds in 1861.

For a few years the Royal Agricultural Society was a fashion, the names of nominal members-of whom a large number were content to dine at the annual show-dinner, and then be heard of no more-reached six thousand, until the time came when the society, so rich on paper, found itself scarcely able to pay its way. A resort to the lawyers was the consequence. Thoughtless subscribers were taught that silence to applications for subscriptions did not extinguish their liability. The law processes ended in recovering some much-needed money, and diminishing the list of subscribers to about four thousand. From that time the day of amateur enthusiasm was over, and after a time it became clear that the success of the society depended on the business that could be done at its shows. The exhibitors in each class of live stock found the show-yard a meat market not only for the animals shown, but for their blood relations at home; thus arose a claim for new classes and prizes for other sheep than the aristocracy of the sheepfold-the Leicester and the South Downand numbers followed the classes. The catalogue of the live stock exhibited at the Liverpool show in 1841, fills twenty-four widely printed pages. In 1861, that of Leeds, eighty-five of very close print. But number can give but a faint idea of the improvement in average quality— in weight, in symmetry, in everything that makes live stock profitable-which has been distributed through the length and breadth of the land.

The first show of this great Agricultural Society was held at Oxford in 1839, and very curious it is to look back and compare that initiative exhibition with those which have taken place within the last five, or even ten years. Business had very little to do with the Oxford show; buying or selling, the principal feature, the sustaining power of modern shows, was a minor consideration. The crowds moved in an atmosphere of enthusiasm. Amateurs in agriculture and in stock-breeding dreamed of a time when the farmer's pursuit would be reduced to an exact science, to be learned from books and lectures. The real farmers, full of useful knowledge in their art, and also full of prejudices, stood a little aloof, chiefly interested in the fine show of high-bred live stock. The list of prizes distributed at Oxford is a curious record. In live stock, including horned cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs, there were only twelve classes, each of the cattle classes being for one breed, and obtaining five prizes. It is an example of the difference between the possible improvements in nature and in art, that, in 1861, at Leeds, the greater number of prizes to the short-horn classes were awarded to descendants from Bates's herd, which, in 1839, at Oxford, carried off four out of five prizes; and in the less important herds of Devons and Herefords, we can sometimes trace back prize winners to ancestors equally remote. While from the date of the Cambridge show, in 1840, Jonas Webb's South Down sheep have for twenty-one years maintained their position as the first of their race, by unanimous consent of the whole agricultural world; the revival of the taste for short-horn cattle, the most valuable breed of any in all countries, either as a pure breed or as a cross, may be dated from the Oxford meeting. Our agricultural shows produce live stock in greater numbers, of approved breeds, and, no doubt, the average merit is greater, but it may be doubted whether as good individual animals It has been the wholesome custom of the were not exhibited in each of the principal society to divide England into districts, and breeds in 1840 as in 1861. If there be an ex- every year to pitch its camp and bring its army ception, it is sheep-a much more artificial pro- of improvers, living and mechanical, to some duction than horned stock. With respect to central town of each district; thus seeking to agricultural implements and machinery, the re-inoculate each in turn with the spirit of progress sult of twenty-two years of commercial activity has been more distinct. Pedigree, one of the highest merits in an animal, has no part in the value of a machine. At Oxford, the arrival of sections of machinery and implements from a great Ipswich manufacturer, made a sensation and earned a gold medal. The collection was sent in waggons for the greater part of the distance by road. A long paragraph of the report is devoted to a description of a chaff-cutting

In the department of implements and machinery, the change, improvement, and increase, has been still more remarkable. But to give an idea of this, we must leave generalisation, and invite our readers to accompany us through all the stages by which the show-yard is reached, and then examine it in detail.

by eyesight and earsight. For the breeders and the manufacturers, the feeders and the users of implements, who formed the agricultural army, and could not help but exchange ideas in discussions under the open sky in the daytime, and over the social pipe and glass in the evenings, when the close cram of over-filled inns melted the chronic timidity of Englishmen so often mistaken for pride.

Every year the Council puts up its exhibition