Year: 1875

The violated graves in the improved
portions of the public commons in Bos
ton, Worcester, and other large cities
where ancient burial places were divided
or destroyed, suggest many pathetic
scene and story like the following. All
the reverend tenderness of our natural
affection for our dead, cannot, it seems
stop or stay the hand of improvement,
when it wants the ground where their
bodies were laid. But it is hard to say
whether it is worse to destroy Goods
acre" than to utterly neglect it. The
following is from the Detroit Mich Free
| Press:


If you have ever passed the old deserted
graveyard on Russell street near the
House Of Correction, you know that there
is not more lonely spot in Detroit. 1t
is score of years since any one was
buried there. The fences lean in or out !;
the few trees are ragged in limb and
trunk; the weather-beaten head-stones
lean this way or that, or have fallen
down..


The rich and the poor who sleep un-
der the ragged soil have been dust for
years, and if any of them left friends be-
hind they are scattered now, and are not
here to fill up the sunken graves and
plant flower to take the gloom away.
The other day people saw an old wO-
man wandering through the graveyard,
brushing the moss from some of the head
stones to look at the letters, and study
ing over the quaint characters carved in
the others. By-and-by she crossed the
street and sat down on the steps of a cot
tage, and when people saw how old and
feeble she was, and that her eyes were
full of tears, they pitied her.


She could not answer at first, but by
and-by she told them that she had come
hundreds of miles to take last look at
a grave which she could not find. Half
q century ago she buried a child there,
and all the long years, though moving
here and there, her mothers heart had
not forgotten the dead.


Old now, her steps feeble and her locks
gray, and feeling that she had but little
longer to remain on earth, she had come
across the State alone to have last look
at the little grave. Years had gone by,
but she thought she could walk right to
the spot, and there was half hope in
her heart that strangers hands might
nave kcDt tuc uefuSJOucS Wnltt anu tUc
grave as when she last saw it.


She found the old yard cut up by
streets, the city all around and beyond,
and of the hundreds of mounds and
headstones which she once saw, but a
score or so were left. She sought among
the leaning headstones, and she stood
under the dying willows and searched
the field for the small stone which bore
the words "Our Willie," but the flight
of time and the hand of progress were
more powerful than mothers love.


Fifty years since the little dead body
was lowered into its grave! Half CEN
tury since the headstone was placed to
mark the spot! And yet her mothers
heart brought her back in her old age,
with the hope that her tears might fall
upon the little grave, obliterated and
passed from sight forever.


1t was sad enough to see the tears fall
ing down her wrinkled cheeks, and to
know that her old heart was aching with
disappointment, and men spoke kind
words to her, and women wiped their
eyes I'm sympathy. Looking through her
tears at the bleak and lonely field, its
loneliness relieved and yet made more
lonely by the time-worn headstones and
the clumps of briers, no wonder that the
poor old woman felt il in her heart and
had to sob out


"Pm afraid I can't find him in heaven
heavens 80 largep'