Some attempt was made to regulate funeral expenses. In Salem a tolling of the bell could cost but eightpence, and "the sextons are desired to toll the bells but four strokes in a minute." The undertakers could charge but eight shillings for borrowing chairs, waiting on the pall-holders, and notifying relatives to attend.

The early graves were frequently clustered, were even crowded in irregular groups in the churchyard; and in larger towns, the dead—especially persons of dignity—were buried, as in England, under the church. Sargent, in his "Dealings with the Dead," speaks at length of the latter custom, which prevailed to an inordinate extent in Boston. In smaller settlements some out-of-the-way spot was chosen for a common burial-place, in barren pasture or on lonely hillside, thus forcibly proving the well-known lines of Whittier,

To the natural loneliness of the country burial-place and to its inevitable sadness, is now too frequently added the gloomy and depressing evidence of human neglect. Briers and weeds grow in tangled thickets over the forgotten graves; birch-trees and barberry bushes spring up unchecked. In one a thriving grove of lilac bushes spreads its dusty shade from wall to wall. Winter -killed shrubs of flowering almond or snowballs, planted in tender memory, stand now withered and unheeded, and the few straggling garden flowers-crimson phlox or single hollyhocks-that still live only painfully accent the loneliness by showing that this now forgotten spot was once loved, visited, and cared for.

In many cases the worn gravestone lies forlornly face downward; sometimes,