AN ECCENTRIC MAN.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 10612, 12 May 1896, Page 2

AN ECCENTRIC MAN.

STORY OF TOMBSTONE AND EPITAPH. Many eccentricities in the way of tombstones and epitaphs have been placed on record, but a story told the Taranaki Herald representative the other day by a Victorian visitor to this district certainly should rank amongst foremost efforts of the strange portion of the human race. The story runs that in a certain tombstone maker's yard in a well-known Victorian seaport, there used to be seen for many years (a matter of twenty or thereabouts), a handsome marble tombstone on which appeared rhyming and unique words, and under which a blank was left for the age flf the person for whom it was designed. The words were: - " Beneath this atone Bill Bowden lies ; No ono laughs nor no one cries. "Where he's gone, or how he fares, No one knows, nor no one care 3." Enquiries made disclosed ' the fact that the man whoso name was on the stone was still alive at the time we refer to, and that he had ordered it some time before, and had paid the money for the headpiece. So long, in fact, had the words stared the public in the face, and so well known had become the story, that school children by the score had committed tho epitaph to memory, and used to often recite it in school and family circles. Time rolled on, and the man, who was a widower, married again, but after a few years of B«cond wedded bliss he succumbed ac a ripe old age. The strange idea he had conceived was never carried out, for his widow had the tombstone broken up, and a monument with a more fitting epitaph was placed over the grave of the man who had for so many years cherished such a weird object, and who had actually written his own epitaph.