that he was a bachelor and almost alone,
those of us who were not his kin were not melted and unstrung by that
poignant sense of untimely loss and irreparable removal that makes
some funerals so tragic; but death, however it come, is a mystery
before which one cannot stand unmoved and unregretful; and I, for one,
as I stood there, remembered how easy it would have been oftener to
have ascended to his eyrie and lured him out into Hertfordshire or his
beloved Epping, or even have dragged him away to dinner and whisky
punch; and I found myself meditating, too, as the profoundly
impressive service rolled on, how melancholy it was that all that
storied brain, with its thousands of exquisite phrases and its perhaps
unrivalled knowledge of Shakespearean philology, should have ceased to
be. For such a cessation, at any rate, say what one will of
immortality, is part of the sting of death, part of the victory of the
grave, which St. Paul denied with such magnificent irony.

And then we filed out into the churchyard, which is a new and very
large one, although the church is old, and at a snail's pace, led by
the clergyman, we crept along, a little black company, for, I suppose,
nearly a quarter of a mile, under the cold grey sky. As I said, many
of us were old, and most of us were indoor men, and I was amused to
see how close to the head some of us held our hats--the merest
barleycorn of interval being maintained for reverence' sake; whereas
the sexton and the clergyman had slipped on those black velvet
skull-caps which God, in His infinite mercy, either completely
overlooks, or seeing, smiles at. And there our old friend was
committed to the earth, amid the contending shouts of the football
players, and then we all clapped our hats on our heads with firmness
(as he would have wished us to do long before), and returned to the
town to drink tea in an ancient hostelry, and exchange memories,
quaint, and humorous, and touching, and beautiful, of the dead.

_E. V. Lucas._

FIRES

A Friend of mine making a list of the things needed for the cottage
that he had taken, put at the head "bellows." Then he thought for some
minutes, and was found merely to have added "tongs" and "poker." Then
he asked someone to finish it. A fire, indeed, furnishes. Nothing
else, not even a chair, is absolutely necessary; and it is difficult
for a fire to be too large. Some of the grates put into modern houses
by the jerry-builders would mov