"God forbid!" I involuntarily ejaculated, for somehow I was not looking for that form of question, and it caught me a little off my guard. But I hastened to make amends for my rudeness, and say, "I simply meant I had not had the honor—for I would not deliberately speak discourteously of a friend of yours.You were saying that you were robbed—and it was a shame, too—but it appears by what is left of the shroud you have on that it was a costly one in its day.How did …"
A most ghastly expression began to develop among the decayed features and shriveled integuments of my guest's face, and I was beginning to grow uneasy and distressed, when he told me he was only working up a deep, smile, with a wink in it, to suggest that about the time he acquired his present garment a ghost in a neighboring cemetery missed one.
This reassured me, but I begged him to confine himself to speech thenceforth, because his facial expression was uncertain. Even with the most elaborate care it was liable to miss fire.Smiling should especially be avoided.What he might honestly consider a shining success was likely to strike me in a very different light.I said I liked to see a skeleton cheerful, even decorously playful, but I did not think smiling was a skeleton's best hold.
"Yes, friend," said the poor skeleton, "the facts are just as I have given them to you. Two of these old graveyards—the one that I resided in and one further along have been deliberately neglected by our descendants of today until there is no occupying them any longer.Aside from the osteological discomfort of it—and that is no light matter this rainy weather—the present state of things is ruinous to property.We have got to move or be content to see our effects wasted away and utterly destroyed.
"Now, you will hardly believe it, but it is true, nevertheless, that there isn't a single coffin in good repair among all my acquaintance—now that is an absolute fact. I do not refer to low people who come in a pine box mounted on an express-wagon, but I am talking about your high-toned, silver-mounted burial-case, your monumental sort, that travel under black plumes at the head of a procession and have choice of cemetery lots—I mean folks like the Jarvises, and the Bledsoes and the Burlings, and such.They are all about ruined."