There were usually some strange records in these country churchyards,
and we generally found them in the older portions of the burial-grounds;
but we had very little time to look for them as the night was coming on,
so we secured the services of the verger, who pointed out in the new
part of the churchyard a stone recording the history of Charles Richard
Potter in the following words:
Born--May 11, 1788.
Married--May 11, 1812.
Died--May 11, 1858.
So the eleventh day of May was a lucky or an unlucky day for Mr.
Potter--probably both; but one strange feature which we only thought of
afterwards was that he had lived exactly the allotted span of three
score years and ten. In the old part of the yard were the following
epitaphs:
The Earth's a City
Full of crooked streets
Death is ye market-place
Where all must meet
If life was merchandise
That man could buy
The rich would always live
Ye poor must die.
In bygone times it was no unusual thing to find dead bodies on the road,
or oftener a short distance from it, where the owners had laid
themselves down to die; we ourselves remembered, in a lonely place, only
a field's breadth from the coach road to London, a pit at the side of
which years ago the corpse of a soldier had been found in the bushes.
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