a far more unintelligible manner than any other
man alive.

When from my bath next morning I
overheard Mr. Kindheart and the upholsterer in
conference on the top of an echoing staircase;
and when I overheard Mr. Kindheart rendering
English Undertaking phrases into very choice
Italian, and the upholsterer replying in the
unknown Tongues; and when I furthermore
remembered that the local funerals had no
resemblance to English funerals; I became in my
secret bosom apprehensive. But Mr. Kindheart
informed me at breakfast that measures had
been taken to ensure a signal success.

As the funeral was to take place at sunset,
and as I knew to which of the city gates it must
tend, I went out at that gate as the sun
descended, and walked along the dusty, dusty
road. I had not walked far, when I encountered
this procession:

1. Mr. Kindheart, much abashed, on an
immense grey horse.

2. A bright yellow coach and pair, driven by
a coachman in bright red velvet knee-breeches
and waistcoat. (This was the established local
idea of State.) Both coach doors kept open by
the coffin, which was on its side within, and
sticking out at each.

3. Behind the coach, the mourner, for whom
the coach was intended, in the dust.

4. Concealed behind a roadside well for the
irrigation of a garden, the unintelligible
Upholsterer, admiring.

It matters little now. Coaches of all colours
are alike to poor Kindheart, and he rests far
North of the little cemetery with the cypress-
trees, by the city walls where the Mediterranean
is so beautiful.

My first funeral, a fair representative funeral
after its kind, was that of the husband of a married
servant, once my nurse. She married for money.
Sally Flanders, after a year or two of matrimony,
became the relict of Flanders, a small master-
builder; and either she or Flanders had done
me the honour to express a desire that I should
"follow." I may have been seven or eight years
old;—young enough, certainly, to feel rather
alarmed by the expression, as not knowing where
the invitation was held to terminate, and how
far I was expected to follow the deceased
Flanders. Consent being given by the heads of
houses, I was jobbed up into what was
pronounced at home decent mourning (comprehending
somebody else's shirt, unless my memory
deceives me), and was admonished that if, when
the funeral was in action, I put my hands in my
pockets, or took my eyes out of my pocket-
handkerchief, I was personally lost, and my
family disgraced. On the eventful day, having
tried to get myself into a disastrous frame of
mind, and having formed a very poor opinion of
myself because I couldn't cry, I repaired to
Sally's. Sally was an excellent creature, and
had been a good wife to old Flanders, but the
moment I saw her I knew that she was not
in her own real natural state. She formed
a sort of Coat of Arms, grouped with a smelling-
bottle, a handkerchief, an orange, a bottle
of vinegar, Flanders's sister, her own sister,
Flanders's brother's wife, and two neighbouring
gossips—all in mourning, and all ready to
hold her whenever she fainted. At sight of poor
little me she became much agitated (agitating
me much more), and having exclaimed, "O
here's dear Master Uncommercial!" became
hysterical, and swooned as if I had been the
death of her. An affecting scene followed,
during which I was handed about and poked at
her by various people, as if I were the bottle of
salts. Reviving a little, she embraced me, said,
"You knew him well, dear Master Uncommercial,
and he knew you!" and fainted again:
which, as the rest of the Coat of Arms soothingly
said, "done her credit." Now, I knew that she
needn't have fainted unless she liked, and that
she wouldn't have fainted unless it had been
expected of her, quite as well as I know it at this
day. It made me feel uncomfortable, and
hypocritical besides. I was not sure but that it might
be manners in me to faint next, and I resolved to
keep my eye on Flanders's uncle, and if I saw
any signs of his going in that direction, to go
too, politely. But Flanders's uncle (who was a
weak little old retail grocer) had only one
idea, which was that we all wanted tea; and he
handed us cups of tea all round, incessantly,
whether we refused or not. There was a
young nephew of Flanders's present, to whom
Flanders, it was rumoured, had left nineteen
guineas. He drank all the tea that was offered
him, this nephew—amounting, I should say, to
several quarts—and ate as much plum-cake as
he could possibly come by; but he felt it to be
decent mourning that he should now and then
stop in the midst of a lump of cake, and appear
to forget that his mouth was full, in the
contemplation of his uncle's memory. I felt all
this to be the fault of the undertaker, who was
handing us gloves on a tea-tray as if they were
muffins, and tying us into cloaks (mine had to
be pinned up all round, it was so long for me),
because I knew that he was making game. So,
when we got out into the streets, and I
constantly disarranged the procession by tumbling
on the people before me because my handkerchief
blinded my eyes, and tripping up the
people behind me because my cloak was so
long, I felt that we were all making game. I
was truly sorry for Flanders, but I knew that
was no reason why we should be trying (the
"women with their heads in hoods like coal-
scuttles with the black side outward) to keep
step with a man in a scarf, carrying a thing like
a mourning spy-glass, which he was going to
open presently and sweep the horizon with. I
knew that we should not all have been speaking
in one particular key-note struck by the
undertaker, if we had not been making game. Even
in our faces we were every one of us as like the
undertaker as if we had been his own family,
and I perceived that this could not have
happened unless we had been making game.
When we returned to Sally's, it was all of a piece.
The continued impossibility of getting on without