“Some are. This is—I see’d it with my own eyes last night. I went with the boys to Grosvenor Square, and I see’d the fine folks going into a ball. There was the madams in their satins, and laces, and feathers, and the men like princes every one of them. And the young gels in white as ef they were sort of angels. You could smell the flowers from the balconies right down in the street, and once I was pushed forrard, and I got a good sight right into the house. My word, Molly, it wor enough to dazzle yer! The soft look of it and the richness of it, and the dazzle of the white marble walls! Oh, my word, what a story I could make up of a princess living in a palace like that. What’s the matter, Molly.”
“Whisht,” said Molly, “howld your tongue. There’s some corpses coming down the road. If there’s one thing I love more than another it’s a corpse, and there are three of them coming down in hearses. Three together—glory! There’s a sight! ’Tis a damp day they has for their buryin’, poor critters!”
Molly stood up in her excitement, pushing her despised basket of withered flowers behind her. The wind had blown her tall hat crooked, and had disarranged her unkempt grey hair, which surrounded her weather-beaten countenance now in grisly locks.
Putting her arms akimbo, she came out from under the shelter of the railway portico to see the funeral processions go by. Three hearses, one following the other—such a sight was worth a wet afternoon to behold. Molly, in her excitement, rushed back to where Jill was standing, and caught her roughly by the arm.
“Come on,” she said. “They are the purtiest coffins I has seen for many a day. By the size of them they must howld full-grown men. Ah! what a wake the critters would have had in ould Ireland! Swate it would have been, and wouldn’t the whiskey have flown around! Ah, worra me, it’s a sorrowful day when they don’t wake the dead. There they go! there’s the first—six foot high if he was an inch—a powerful big coffin he takes. Well, he’ll find it damp getting under the earth on a day like this. My word, Jill! Look at the flowers! Why, they’re heaped up on that coffin, and chice ’uns too—roses and lilies, and them big white daisies. Oh, shame, they’ll all go underground, I expect. Here’s the second! Can you see it, Jill? He’s not so big, five foot seven or eight, I guess. Heaps of flowers, too. Simple waste, I call it, to give flowers to a corpse. It can nayther smell ’em, or look at ’em. Ah, and here’s the last—poor faller, poor faller!”
The Irishwoman’s ready tears sprang to her eyes. She turned and faced Jill.
“He ain’t got one single flower on him!” she said. “Poor faller! Where’s his wife, or his swate-heart? Poor faller, I do call it a negleckful shame of them.”
“But I thought you said—”
“Never mind what I said, I forgits it meself. There’s the coffin, without a scrap of trimmin’ on it, and the poor corpse inside a-frettin’ and a-mourning. Oh, it’s moighty disrespec’ful. Suppose it was your Nat, Jill?”
“No, it should never be my Nat,” said Jill, with a little cry.