every one knelt down and a last prayer was said. Then
the cousins of the dead man got ready two oars and some pieces of
rope--the men of his own family seemed too broken with grief to know
what they were doing--the coffin was tied up, and the procession
began. The old woman walked close behind the coffin, and I happened
to take a place just after them, among the first of the men. The
rough lane to the graveyard slopes away towards the east, and the
crowd of women going down before me in their red dresses, cloaked
with red pethcoats, with the waistband that is held round the head
just seen from behind, had a strange effect, to which the white
coffin and the unity of colour gave a nearly cloistral quietness.

This time the graveyard was filled with withered grass and bracken
instead of the early ferns that were to be seen everywhere at the
other funeral I have spoken of, and the grief of the people was of a
different kind, as they had come to bury a young man who had died in
his first manhood, instead of an old woman of eighty. For this
reason the keen lost a part of its formal nature, and was recited as
the expression of intense personal grief by the young men and women
of the man's own family.

When the coffin had been laid down, near the grave that was to be
opened, two long switches were cut out from the brambles among the
rocks, and the length and breadth of the coffin were marked on them.
Then the men began their work, clearing off stones and thin layers
of earth, and breaking up an old coffin that was in the place into
which the new one had to be lowered. When a number of blackened
boards and pieces of bone had been thrown up with the clay, a skull
was lifted out, and placed upon a gravestone. Immediately the old
woman, the mother of the dead man, took it up in her hands, and
carried it away by herself. Then she sat down and put it in her
lap--it was the skull of her own mother--and began keening and
shrieking over it with the wildest lamentation.

As the pile of mouldering clay got higher beside the grave a heavy
smell began to rise from it, and the men hurried with their work,
measuring the hole repeatedly with the two rods of bramble. When it
was nearly deep enough the old woman got up and came back to the
coffin, and began to beat on it, holding the skull in her left hand.
This last moment of grief was the most terrible of all. The young
women were nearly lying among the stones, worn out with their
passion