when I went to a schoolmistress
who could teach her scholars nothing but to love her dearly. It was to
my Grandmother, a kind but strict woman, to whom I owed what scant
reading and writing ken I had at eight years of age.

Rudely and disdainfully treated as I now was, my governors thought it
fit, for the world's sake, that I should be put into decent mourning;
for my grandmother's death could not be kept from the Quality, and there
was to be a grand funeral. She lay in State in her great bedchamber;
tapers in silver sconces all around her, an Achievement of arms in a
lozenge at her head, the walls all hung with fine black cloth edged with
orris, and pieced with her escocheon, properly blazoned; and she
herself, white and sharp as waxwork in her face and hands, arrayed in
her black dress, with crimson ribbons and crimson scarf, and a locket of
gold on her breast. They would not bury her with her rubies, but these,
too, were laid upon her bier, which was of black velvet, and with a fair
Holland sheet over all.

Not alone the chamber itself, but the anterooms and staircase were hung
from cornice to skirting with black. The undertaker's men were ever in
the house: they ate and drank whole mountains of beef and bread, whole
seas of ale and punch (thus to qualify their voracity) in the servants'
hall. They say my Grandmother's funeral cost a thousand pounds, which
Cadwallader and Mrs. Talmash would really have grudged, but that it was
the will of the executors, who were persons of condition, and more
powerful than a steward and a waiting-woman. In her own testament my
Grandmother said nothing about the ordering of her obsequies; but her
executors took upon them to provide her with such rites as beseemed her
degree. In those days the Quality were very rich in their deaths; and,
for my part, I dissent from the starveling and nipcheese performances of
modern funerals. It is most true that a hole in the sand, or a
coral-reef, full fathom five, has been at many times my likeliest
Grave; but I have left it nevertheless in my Will--which let those who
come after me dispute if they dare--that I may be buried as a Gentleman
of long descent, with all due Blacks, and Plumes, and Lights, and a
supper for my friends, and mourning cloaks for six poor men.

Why the doctors should have remained in the house jangling and glozing
in the very lobby of Death, and eating of cold meats and drinking of
sweet wine in the parlour, after the breath