ruded
slowly into the open air a coffin carried on four men's shoulders, and
covered with a magnificent black velvet pall.

Mat stopped the moment he saw the coffin, and struck his hand violently
on the paling by his side. "Dead!" he exclaimed under his breath.

"A friend of the late Miss Grice's?" asked a gently inquisitive voice
near him.

He did not hear. All his attention was fixed on the coffin, as it was
borne slowly over the garden path. Behind it walked two gentlemen,
mournfully arrayed in black cloaks and hat-bands. They carried white
handkerchiefs in their hands, and used them to wipe--not their eyes--but
their lips, on which the balmy dews of recent wine-drinking glistened
gently.

"Dix, and Nawby--the medical attendant of the deceased, and the
solicitor who is her sole executor," said the voice near Mat, in tones
which had ceased to be gently inquisitive, and had become complacently
explanatory instead. "That's Millbury the undertaker, and the other is
Gutteridge of the White Hart Inn, his brother-in-law, who supplies the
refreshments, which in my opinion makes a regular job of it," continued
the voice, as two red-faced gentlemen followed the doctor and the
lawyer. "Something like a funeral, this! Not a halfpenny less than
forty pound, I should say, when it's all paid for. Beautiful, ain't it?"
concluded the voice, becoming gently inquisitive again.

Still Mat kept his eyes fixed on the funeral proceedings in front, and
took not the smallest notice of the pertinacious speaker behind him.

The coffin was placed in the hearse. Dr. Dix and Mr. Nawby entered
the mourning coach provided for them. The smug human vultures who prey
commercially on the civilized dead, arranged themselves, with black
wands, in solemn Undertakers' order of procession on either side of
the funeral vehicles. Those clumsy pomps of feathers and velvet, of
strutting horses and marching mutes, which are still permitted among us
to desecrate with grotesquely-shocking fiction the solemn fact of death,
fluttered out in their blackest state grandeur and showed their most
woeful state paces, as the procession started magnificently with its
meager offering of one dead body more to the bare and awful grave.

When Mary Grice died, a fugitive and an outcast, the clown's wife and
the Irish girl who rode in the circus wept for her, stranger though she
was, as they followed her coffin to the poor corner of the churchyard.
When Joanna Grice died