or should it convey incidentally
any real picture of sorrow or suffering or death. There
is a great deal in the humour of Scotland (I admit its
general merit) which seems to me not being a Scotchman,
to sin in this respect. Take this familiar story (I quote
it as something already known and not for the sake of
telling it).

A Scotchman had a sister-in-law--his wife's sister--with
whom he could never agree. He always objected to going
anywhere with her, and in spite of his wife's entreaties
always refused to do so. The wife was taken mortally ill
and as she lay dying, she whispered, "John, ye'll drive
Janet with you to the funeral, will ye no?" The Scotchman,
after an internal struggle, answered, "Margaret, I'll do
it for ye, but it'll spoil my day."

Whatever humour there may be in this is lost for me by
the actual and vivid picture that it conjures up--the
dying wife, the darkened room and the last whispered
request.

No doubt the Scotch see things differently. That wonderful
people--whom personally I cannot too much admire--always
seem to me to prefer adversity to sunshine, to welcome
the prospect of a pretty general damnation, and to live
with grim cheerfulness within the very shadow of death.
Alone among the nations they have converted the devil
--under such names as Old Horny--into a familiar
acquaintance not without a certain grim charm of his own.
No doubt also there enters into their humour something
of the original barbaric attitude towards things. For a
primitive people who saw death often and at first hand,
and for whom the future world was a vivid reality that
could be _felt_, as it were, in the midnight forest and
heard in the roaring storm, it was no doubt natural to
turn the flank of terror by forcing a merry and jovial
acquaintance with the unseen world. Such a practice as
a wake, and the merry-making about the corpse, carry us
back to the twilight of the world, with the poor savage
in his bewildered misery, pretending that his dead still
lived. Our funeral with its black trappings and its
elaborate ceremonies is the lineal descendant of a
merry-making. Our undertaker is, by evolution, a genial
master of ceremonies, keeping things lively at the
death-dance. Thus have the ceremonies and the trappings
of death been transformed in the course of ages till the
forced gaiety is gone, and the black hearse and the gloomy
mutes betoken the cold dignity of our despair.

But I fear this article is gett