On closer inspection,
we found an almost illegible epitaph on the stone, and with difficulty
made out this forlorn verse:--
"Poorly lived,
And poorly died,
Poorly buried,
And no one cried."
It would be hard to compress the story of a cold and luckless life,
death, and burial into fewer words, or more impressive ones; at least,
we found them impressive, perhaps because we had to re-create the
inscription by scraping away the lichens from the faintly traced
letters. The grave was on the shady and damp side of the church, endwise
towards it, the head-stone being within about three feet of the
foundation-wall; so that, unless the poor man was a dwarf, he must have
been doubled up to fit him into his final resting-place. No wonder that
his epitaph murmured against so poor a burial as this! His name, as well
as I could make it out, was Treeo,--John Treeo, I think,--and he died in
1810, at the age of seventy-four. The gravestone is so overgrown with
grass and weeds, so covered with unsightly lichens, and crumbly with
time and foul weather, that it is questionable whether anybody will ever
be at the trouble of deciphering it again. But there is a quaint and sad
kind of enjoyment in defeating (to such slight degree as my pen may do
it) the probabilities of oblivion for poor John Treeo, and asking a
little sympathy for him, half a century after his death, and making him
better and more widely known, at least, than any other slumberer in
Lillington church-yard: he having been, as appearances go, the outcast
of them all.
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