BABY

Following out the instinct planted so deeply in human nature for treating
with the utmost care and at great expense when dead those, who, when
alive, have been served with careless parsimony, there started from the
door of No. 1 in Hound Street a funeral procession of three four-wheeled
cabs. The first bore the little coffin, on which lay a great white wreath
(gift of Cecilia and Thyme). The second bore Mrs. Hughs, her son
Stanley, and Joshua Creed. The third bore Martin Stone. In the first
cab Silence was presiding with the scent of lilies over him who in his
short life had made so little noise, the small grey shadow which had
crept so quietly into being, and, taking his chance when he was not
noticed, had crept so quietly out again. Never had he felt so restful,
so much at home, as in that little common coffin, washed as he was to an
unnatural whiteness, and wrapped in his mother's only spare sheet. Away
from all the strife of men he was Journeying to a greater peace. His
little aloe-plant had flowered; and, between the open windows of the only
carriage he had ever been inside, the wind--which, who knows? he had
perhaps become--stirred the fronds of fern and the flowers of his funeral
wreath. Thus he was going from that world where all men were his
brothers.

From the second cab the same wind was rigidly excluded, and there was
silence, broken by the aged butler's breathing. Dressed in his Newmarket
coat, he was recalling with a certain sense of luxury past, journeys in
four-wheeled cabs--occasions when, seated beside a box corded and secured
with sealing-wax, he had taken his master's plate for safety to the bank;
occasions when, under a roof piled up with guns and boxes, he had sat
holding the "Honorable Bateson's" dog; occasions when, with some young
person by his side, he had driven at the tail of a baptismal, nuptial, or
funeral cortege. These memories of past grandeur came back to him with
curious poignancy, and for some reason the words kept rising in his mind:
'For richer or poorer, for better or worser, in health and in sick
places, till death do us part.' But in the midst of the exaltation of
these recollections the old heart beneath his old red flannel
chest-protector--that companion of his exile--twittering faintly at short
intervals, made him look at the woman by his side. He longed to convey
to her some little of the satisfaction he felt in the fact that this was
by no means the low cla