Everytime I meander through the mossy pathways of South Park Street Cemetery, I stumble upon different perspectives to look at the graves, the tombs and the accompanying epitaphs.

It is a  tranquil precinct, but full of unique perspectives- be it the unique architectural blend, the mammoth sizes of the graves,  interesting insights into the society of the time, the mention of professions of the people buried there differing in both social and financial positions - the cemetery has it all.

This time while walking through the crumbling collonades, I came across a grave of a Thomas Francis Hartwell. Its not that I was looking for this grave, neither do I know anything about this gentleman resting peacefully in the Indian tropics. What made me stop in my tracks was the epitaph. I noticed the usage of the letter "f" in many words where it actually should have been "s". "sacred" was "facred", "shade" was spelt as "fhade", "sorrow" as "forrow" and many such in the while engraving.

Intrigued, I set about looking into this. It definitely could not have been a mistake as I later noticed a similar pattern in many other epitaphs. The discovery was something really interesting.

The English alphabet back then had something called a "long s" which looked like "f" and was used until the 11th and 12th centuries. The letter s that we use today was also there but was mostly used as the upper case S. The long s was used when the letter appeared in the beginning or in the middle of a word. So in this epitaph, the word "shade" is written as "fhade" and "promise" as "promife".

And this is not enough. There used to be short or round s too which was used after a long s which appeared in the middle of a word. This is aptly displayed in the third last line of the epitaph where the word "ruthless" is written as "ruthlefs".

With time, the long s disappeared from scripts as it was getting confused with the letter f and also because the long and short s had the same sound