for the eternal rest. The cemeteries of wealthy London abound in
dear and great associations, or at worst preach homilies which connect
themselves with human dignity and pride. Here on the waste limits of
that dread East, to wander among tombs is to go hand in hand with the
stark and eyeless emblem of mortality; the spirit falls beneath the cold
burden of ignoble destiny. Here lie those who were born for toll;
who, when toil has worn them to the uttermost, have but to yield their
useless breath and pass into oblivion. For them is no day, only the
brief twilight of a winter sky between the former and the latter night
For them no aspiration; for them no hope of memory in the dust; their
very children are wearied into forgetfulness. Indistinguishable units
in the vast throng that labours but to support life, the name of each,
father, mother, child, is as a dumb cry for the warmth and love of which
Fate so stinted them. The wind wails above their narrow tenements; the
sandy soil, soaking in the rain as soon as it has fallen, is a symbol
of the great world which absorbs their toil and straightway blots their
being.

It being Sunday afternoon the number of funerals was considerable;
even to bury their dead the toilers cannot lose a day of the wage
week. Around the chapel was a great collection of black vehicles with
sham-tailed mortuary horses; several of the families present must have
left themselves bare in order to clothe a coffin in the way they deemed
seemly. Emma and her sister had made their own funeral garments, and the
former, in consenting for the sake of poor Jane to receive the aid which
Mutimer offered, had insisted through Alice that there should be no
expenditure beyond the strictly needful. The carriage which conveyed her
and Kate alone followed the hearse from Hoxton; it rattled along at a
merry pace, for the way was lengthy, and a bitter wind urged men and
horses to speed. The occupants of the box kept up a jesting colloquy.

Impossible to read the burial service over each of the dead separately;
time would not allow it. Emma and Kate found themselves crowded among
a number of sobbing women, just in time to seat themselves before the
service began. Neither of them had moist eyes; the elder looked about
the chapel with blank gaze, often shivering with cold; Emma's face was
bent downwards, deadly pale, set in unchanging woe. A world had fallen
to pieces about her; she did not feel the ground upon which she tro