e girls and the beats holding handkerchiefs to
their eyes and keeping their heads bent, and sobbing a little. There
warn't no other sound but the scraping of the feet on the floor and
blowing noses--because people always blows them more at a funeral than
they do at other places except church.

When the place was packed full the undertaker he slid around in his black
gloves with his softy soothering ways, putting on the last touches, and
getting people and things all ship-shape and comfortable, and making no
more sound than a cat. He never spoke; he moved people around, he
squeezed in late ones, he opened up passageways, and done it with nods,
and signs with his hands. Then he took his place over against the wall.
He was the softest, glidingest, stealthiest man I ever see; and there
warn't no more smile to him than there is to a ham.

They had borrowed a melodeum--a sick one; and when everything was ready a
young woman set down and worked it, and it was pretty skreeky and
colicky, and everybody joined in and sung, and Peter was the only one
that had a good thing, according to my notion. Then the Reverend Hobson
opened up, slow and solemn, and begun to talk; and straight off the most
outrageous row busted out in the cellar a body ever heard; it was only
one dog, but he made a most powerful racket, and he kept it up right
along; the parson he had to stand there, over the coffin, and wait--you
couldn't hear yourself think. It was right down awkward, and nobody
didn't seem to know what to do. But pretty soon they see that
long-legged undertaker make a sign to the preacher as much as to say,
"Don't you worry--just depend on me." Then he stooped down and begun to
glide along the wall, just his shoulders showing over the people's heads.
So he glided along, and the powwow and racket getting more and more
outrageous all the time; and at last, when he had gone around two sides
of the room, he disappears down cellar. Then in about two seconds we
heard a whack, and the dog he finished up with a most amazing howl or
two, and then everything was dead still, and the parson begun his solemn
talk where he left off. In a minute or two here comes this undertaker's
back and shoulders gliding along the wall again; and so he glided and
glided around three sides of the room, and then rose up, and shaded his
mouth with his hands, and stretched his neck out towards the preacher,
over the people's heads, and says, in a kind of a coarse w