ceased has been a member of several clubs,
on which occasions the undertakers meet and "settle" between them their
several shares in the performance of the funeral. It is not unusual to
insure a child's life in four or five of these burial clubs; and we have
heard of a case where one man had insured payments in no fewer than
nineteen different burial clubs in Manchester!

When the working-man, in whose family a death has occurred, does not
happen to be a member of a burial club, he is still governed by their
example, and has to tax himself seriously to comply with the usages of
society, and give to his wife or child a respectable funeral. Where it
is the father of the family himself who has died, the case is still
harder. Perhaps all the savings of his life are spent in providing
mourning for his wife and children at his death. Such an expense, at
such a time, is ruinous, and altogether unjustifiable.

Does putting on garments of a certain colour constitute true mourning?
Is it not the heart and the affections that mourn, rather than the
outside raiment? Bingham, in speaking of the primitive Christians, says
that "they did not condemn the notion of going into a mourning habit for
the dead, nor yet much approve of it, but left it to all men's liberty
as an indifferent thing, rather commending those that either omitted it
wholly, or in short laid it aside again, as acting more according to the
bravery and philosophy of a Christian."

John Wesley directed, in his will, that six poor men should have twenty
shillings each for carrying his body to the grave,--"For," said he, "I
particularly desire that there may be no hearse, no coach, no
escutcheon, no pomp, except the tears of those that loved me, and are
following me to Abraham's bosom. I solemnly adjure my executors, in the
name of God, punctually to observe this."

It will be very difficult to alter the mourning customs of our time. We
may anxiously desire to do so, but the usual question will occur--"What
will people say?" "What will the world say?" We involuntarily shrink
back, and play the coward like our neighbours. Still, common sense,
repeatedly expressed, will have its influence; and, in course of time,
it cannot fail to modify the fashions of society The last act of Queen
Adelaide, by which she dispensed with the hired mummery of undertakers'
grief,--and the equally characteristic request of Sir Robert Peel on his
deathbed, that no ceremony, nor pomp, should a