The One Man (lazily): "Well, he was kinder poplar with widders and widderers—sorter soothen 'em a kinder, keerless way; slung 'em suthin' here and there, sometimes outer the Book, sometimes outer hisself, ez a man of experience as hed hed sorror. Hed, they say (VERY CAUTIOUSLY), lost three wives hisself, and five children by this yer new disease—dipthery—out in Wisconsin. I don't know the facts, but that's what's got round."
The Other Man: "But how did he lose his poplarity?"
The One Man: "Well, that's the question. You see he interduced some things into ondertaking that waz new. He hed, for instance, a way, as he called it, of manniperlating the features of the deceased."
The Other Man (quietly): "How manniperlating?"
The One Man (struck with a bright and aggressive thought): "Look yer, did ye ever notiss how, generally speakin', onhandsome a corpse is?"
The Other Man had noticed this fact.
The One Man (returning to his fact): "Why there was Mary Peebles, ez was daughter of my wife's bosom friend—a mighty pooty girl and a professing Christian—died of scarlet fever. Well, that gal—I was one of the mourners, being my wife's friend—well, that gal, though I hedn't, perhaps, oughter say—lying in that casket, fetched all the way from some A1 establishment in Chicago, filled with flowers and furbelows—didn't really seem to be of much account. Well, although my wife's friend, and me a mourner—well, now, I was—disappointed and discouraged."
The Other Man (in palpably affected sympathy): "Sho! now!"
"Yes, SIR! Well, you see, this yer ondertaker, this Wilkins, hed a way of correctin' all thet. And just by manniperlation. He worked over the face of the deceased ontil he perduced what the survivin' relatives called a look of resignation,—you know, a sort of smile, like. When he wanted to put in any extrys, he perduced what he called—hevin' reglar charges for this kind of work—a Christian's hope."
The Other Man: "I want to know."