Away from the larger cities, the improvement of the quiet abodes of the dead is not keeping pace with the progress of cultivation and improvement in the living. Why the large cities - who must usually of necessity bury their dead on high-priced ground -should more liberally and more becomingly provide for the dear ones whose affection remains only in the memory, than the village and the country, where land is more abundant and labor cheaper, is a question I need not attempt to answer. There are many good reasons why there should now exist a tastefully kept burial-place contiguous to every village, and in every rural district How many, think you, Mr. Editor, are there of this character! You may range the whole country through, and I will venture that it will not have shown you a dozen whose keeping is creditable to the wealth and supposed affection and kindred of the large portion of the community whose certain destiny it is to provide some kind of a place for the dead. Nearly every community has its church edifices - pretty much up to the means of that community, too, in convenience and decoration; - but while we are taught in them that the spirit of the good shall have a beautiful home beyond the grave, the hearer must instinctively and gloomily turn to the destiny of the mortal casement left vacant by its departure.

He can not help thinking of the desolate home that barbarous custom has thought good enough for such bodies as his when the spirit shall have left it And perhaps he can not help thinking, too, how much better the accommodation within those decorated walls for his carnal portion - whose wants the religious teacher tells him should be as nothing - than that same earthy tenement is likely to get when it can no longer sit upon the pleasant cushion. Reflections of this nature may quite naturally suggest the thought that there must be an essential want in our education, when the most devoted of parents, children, and friends, allow the remains of their relatives to pass from their pleasant homes on earth to such dreary and desolate habitations beneath it Here some barbarous nations may shame us.

Happily there may be traced a somewhat coincident change for the better in the school-house and the burial-place. While through the early influences of well beautified, well ventilated, and convenient school structures, opportunity is afforded for the refinement as well as health of our youth, there has been some progress from the barren "grave-yard" to the properly embellished cemetery. But this progress has been nearly all confined to the large cities. Thousands of villages in America have chosen their interment grounds almost solely with reference to first cost; scarcely with an eye to beauty of position, or with reference to protection. Generally, grounds have been chosen where water might escape, and where the sexton's spade should not find too much impediment either by stone or clay. But how many have been set off from the corner of some treeless field, whose best day of farming fruition had passed, and whose owner could find no more profitable use to put it to! A day's ride in almost any part of wealthy and cultivated New England will usually show many cheerless spots whose purpose is surely marked by broken, leaning, and prostrate stones; by the twisted mats of decayed grass and briars; and by the cold, stately, and mocking monuments that ostentation raised to preserve that same caste in the population of the dead that the names to whose memory they were erected, strove to maintain in life.

If you step over the stile, you will find as much incongruity as you are likely to find in the same space elsewhere. You will pass the stunted Willows - almost the only tree-life in the spot, and they with scarcely vigor enough, even, to effectively weep. Have a careful eye to briars, and to the snakes with which your imagination at least will people a spot so congenial to their tastes. Look out, too, for the recumbent, half-visible slabs that in the first impulse of grief were made to tell such flattering tales. The virtues of the living lor whom they speak, seem to have had their full posthumous reward in the flattering or warning lines of the graver's chisel; for you see no further offering to their memory - nothing else to show that the ground below you holds something once valuable. The mound of earth has sunk to the surface level or below it, and you will readily conjecture that no shrub nor flower had ever been planted there. Advancing, occasionally a forlorn Myrtle, stunted Sweet-briar or Blush Rose, will sup-pticatingly peep out at you through the dead and matted grass and weeds, as if hopeful of relief.

As your eyes will be entirely open for shade, you will not overlook the more pretending Balsam Fir, which has found its way into the lot - as stiff and unge-nial as all the rest Here a tall picket fence, mainly white, with red tops, carefully guarding and as happily hiding what it incloses; then another, all black; then another, with white pickets and black tops. With little disposition to linger among associations so forbidding, you will gladly reach the opposite side from where you entered, and be gratified to find relief for your vision in the naked field beyond.

In one of the oldest and wealthiest towns of Connecticut, and within a mile of each other, there are two very much such spots as I have described. One is the depositure of many generations, and was dedicated to the dead in a ruder and less cultivated age than the present; but the other has been in use a comparatively short time, and was purchased by wealthy people. The town has a larger average wealth to the individual than any community within my acquaintance; - scarcely any poor people, but full of the wealth of long years of rapid accumulation by the old inhabitants, and the superfluity of New York retired merchants. The two miles square whose many well improved eminences look out upon the waters of Long Island Sound, is almost all in the highest state of cultivation. Some of the best planted ornamental grounds and most elaborate architectural specimens in the country here meet the eye in quick succession. But such neglect of the dead! - the tamest and least interesting spot, receiving the smallest possible attention - treeless, shiftless.