FASHIONABLE DEATH.
As it is the ambition of every one to live fashionable, it is their chief wish to be laid in the grave in the same style. Undertakers at fashionable funerals are generally the sexton of some fashionable church, that, perhaps, of the church the deceased was in the habit of attending. This individual prescribes the manner in which the ceremony shall be carried out, and advises certain styles of family mourning. Sometimes the blinds are closed and the gas lighted. The lights in such cases are arranged in the most artistic manner, and every thing is made to look as "interesting" as possible.
A certain fashionable sexton always refuses to allow the female members of the family to follow their dead to the grave. He will not let them be seen at the funeral at all, as he says "it's horridly vulgar to see a lot of women crying about a corpse; and, besides, they're always in the way."
After the funeral is over, none of the bereaved ones can be seen for a certain length of time, the period being regulated by a set decree. They spend the days of their seclusion in consultations with their modiste, in preparing the most fashionable mourning that can be thought of; in this they seem to agree fully with a certain famous modiste, who declared to a widow, but recently bereaved, that "fashionable and becoming mourning is so comforting to a person in affliction."