The immortelle requires no attention: you just hang it up, and there you are; just leave it alone, it will take care of your grief for you, and keep it in mind better than you can; stands weather first-rate, and lasts like boiler-iron.
On sunny days, pretty little chameleons--gracefullest of legged reptiles--creep along the marble fronts of the vaults, and catch flies.
Their changes of color--as to variety--are not up to the creature's reputation.

They change color when a person comes along and hangs up an immortelle; but that is nothing: any right-feeling reptile would do that.
I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards.

I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot accomplish it.

I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it.
It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible.

Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages, when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground, to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the air with disease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must die before their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now, when even the children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse.