CEMETERY CYNICS.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 6, Issue 268, 20 April 1917, Page 2 (Supplement)

CEMETERY CYNICS.

Husbands are often unappreciative of their wares' qualities and virtues in life, but it is not often they express their views on the tombstones of the dear departed spouses. Yet instances are extant where this has. been done, as thus:— Wo lived one-and-twenty years As man and w-ue together; I could not hold her longer here, But I suppose she's soared aloft, For in the late great_thunder Methought I heard her very voice Rending the clouds asunder! That is a distinctly nasty one, but it is not tiio worst of a small hut pretty bad set of tombstone rhymes which set out tho wife's character in anything but rosy hues. Here is an arithmetical ditty wh/ch mournfully shows how the poor husband was "snowed under" in life and cannot regret the departure of the bad weather whrch made life miserable: — We were not one but surely ten, I and the wife I sigh for; My better half supplied the one, And I supplied the cipher! But this even must hide its diminished head, douse its glim, before the concentrated malice of the following. It starts so well. One imagines that idyllic life of perfect matrmonal harmony, and then, like a thunderbolt or a "Jack Johnson," crash comes the last fatal line:— Here rests mv spouse: no oair through life So equal lived as we did: Alike we shared perpetual strife, I knew no rest till she did. And lastly there is a punning effort by another undisconsokvte hu<?band, who finds it difficult to grieve that he is left alone in this vale of tears: — Hero lies my wife, Who's gone on high. If I said I was sorry, I, too, should lie.