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PROWLING about in graveyards may not be an exhilarating pastime for the average person, but it has always been my favorite diversion. My earliest recollection is of the insatiable craving for grim and ghostly things that has dominated my life.
While other youths of my age were engaged in sports or strolling along quiet lanes arm in arm with the maidens of their choice, I was often amusing myself by roaming among the graves of the countryside ancestry or by perching on the dilapidated rail fence that surrounded the neglected village burying ground, trying to-visualize the portentous spectacle when all those tombs should burst asunder at the sound of Gabriel's trumpet and the moldering skeletons within them should stalk rustily forth to take their places at the bar of Judgment.
When thus employed, my morbid imagination would regale me with ghastly visions of doleful nodding skulls borne aloft by fleshless limbs that creaked timorously onward.
Among my most valued possessions are several notebooks which contain much graveyard lore as well as all the epitaphs I have gleaned from a varied assortment of tombstones. Many of these stones were mottled with moss and lichen and crumbling with age, but I found them to be of even more absorbing interest than their modern neighbors, whose cold perfection was as yet unsullied.
Delving for hidden treasure could not have fascinated me more than the deciphering of dim legends on the rigid faces of ancient, time-scarred memorials. When a lad, I enjoyed glibly reciting the most dismal of these productions, to the horror or disgust of my hearers. One inscription, of which I was then especially fond, proclaimed the following mandatory reminder of our common fate:
Reflect, my friend, as you pass by.
As you are now so once was I.
As I am now so you must be;
Prepare for death and follow me.
From out the grave I speak today
To you who now are on the way
To join the millions turned to dust:
There’s no escape, for die you must.
These terse lines repeated in sepulchral tones never failed to grate upon the ears of my audience.
As I grew older my retinue of graveyards was extended by means of a motorcycle, until there was none within a hundred miles with which I was not as familiar as with the ceme-
