[Footnote 2: Build.]
_Epitaph at Wood Ditton._--You have recently appropriated a small space in
your "medium of intercommunication" to the subject of epitaphs. I can
furnish you with one which I have been accustomed to regard as a "grand
climacterical absurdity." About thirty years ago, when making a short
summer ramble, I entered the churchyard of Wood Ditton, near Newmarket, and
my attention was attracted by a headstone, having inlaid into its upper
part a piece of iron, measuring about ten inches by six, and hollowed out
into the shape of a _dish_. I inquired of a cottager residing on the spot
what the thing meant? I was informed that the party whose ashes the grave
covered was a man who, during a long life, had a strange taste for sopping
a slice of bread in a dripping-pan (a pan over which meat has been
roasted), and would relinquish for this all kinds of dishes, sweet or
savoury; that in his will he left a request that a dripping-pan should be
fixed in his gravestone; that he wrote his own epitaph, an exact copy of
which I herewith give you, and which he requested to be engraved on the
stone:
"Here lies my corpse, who was the man
That loved a sop in the dripping-pan;
But now believe me I am dead,--
See here the pan stands at my head.
Still for sops till the last I cried,
But could not eat, and so I died.
My neighbours they perhaps will laugh,
When they read my epitaph."