standing apart, with broad fields spreading on all sides, but no graves at hand. Some distance beyond, perhaps, you will come to a square enclosure, opening into the highway, and this is the cemetery of the congregation. Small family burying-grounds, about the fields, are very common; sometimes it is a retired spot, neatly enclosed, or it may be only a row of graves in one corner of the meadow, or orchard. Walking in the fields a while since, we were obliged to climb a stone wall, and on jumping down into the adjoining meadow, we found we had alighted on a grave; there were several others lying around near the fence, an unhewn stone at the head and foot of each humble hillock. This custom of burying on the farms had its origin, no doubt, in the peculiar circumstances of the early population, thinly scattered over a wide country, and separated by distance and bad roads from any place of public worship. In this way the custom of making the graves of a family upon the homestead gradually found favor among the people, and they learned to look upon it as a melancholy gratification to make the tombs of the departed members of a family near the dwelling of the living. The increase of the population, and the improvement of the roads on one hand, with the changes of property, and the greater number of villages on the other, are now bringing about another state of things. Public cemeteries for parishes, or whole communities, are becoming common, while the isolated burial-places about the farms are more rare than they used to be.
The few church-yards found among us are usually seen in the older parishes; places of worship, recently built, very rarely have a yard attached to them. The narrow, crowded, abandoned church-yards, still seen in the heart of our older towns, have be-
