X
ADAM SCHUNK'S FUNERAL
A crucial struggle with her father, to which both Tillie and Miss Margaret had fearfully looked forward, came about much sooner than Tillie had anticipated. The occasion of it, too, was not at all what she had expected and even planned it to be.
It was her conversion, just a year after she had been taken out of school, to the ascetic faith of the New Mennonites that precipitated the crisis, this conversion being wrought by a sermon which she heard at the funeral of a neighboring farmer.
A funeral among the farmers of Lancaster County is a festive occasion, the most popular form of dissipation known, bringing the whole population forth as in some regions they turn out to a circus.
Adam Schank's death, having been caused by his own hand in a fit of despair over the loss of some money he had unsuccessfully invested, was so sudden and shocking that the effect produced on Canaan Township was profound, not to say awful.
As for Tillie, it was the first event of the kind that had ever come within her experience, and the religious sentiments in which she had been reared aroused in her, in common with the rest of the community, a superstitious fear before this sudden and solemn calling to judgment of one whom they had all known so familiarly, and who had so wickedly taken his own life.
During the funeral at the farm-house, she sat in the crowded parlor where the coffin stood, and though surrounded by people, she felt strangely alone with this weird mystery of Death which for the first time she was realizing.
Her mother was in the kitchen with the other farmers' wives of the neighborhood who were helping to prepare the immense quantity of food necessary to feed the large crowd that always attended a funeral, every one of whom, by the etiquette of the county, remained to supper after the services.