Queer creeter! strange and mysterious doin’s! A-prayin’ and a-fastin’ and a-killin’, a-prayin’ and a-killin’ and a-fastin’! I am glad I hain’t got to straighten out the dark and tangled skein of his life and git the threads a-runnin’ even, and sort out the black threads and the lighter ones and count ’em.
No, it takes a bigger hand than mine to hold ’em, and a eye that looks deeper into the soul of things.
Wall, when he wuz dead at last they laid him in the Pantheon. We visited the spot. We went down first into the big, eight-sided room, a sort of annex, where princes and princesses lay, and then we went down a long flight of steps with walls of jasper, into the room where kings and queens lay asleep.
This is a smaller room, but eight-sided, like the other. The dead lay in black marble coffins, piled up on top of the other, the kings to the right, the queens to the left. Wimmen have to take the second-best place even down there in the grave, but then they wuz in a condition where they couldn’t argy about it, and where it wouldn’t hurt their feelin’s.
It must have been a sight to see a king buried. No funeral in Jonesville ever approached it in solemnity or mystery.
You know they don’t give up that a king is dead till they go through with certain performances, but they treat the dead body with all the honor that they would give the livin’ monarch. When the procession gits up to the door, the new-comer has to be announced.
A voice sez, “Who would enter here?”
They reply, “King Philip.”
Then the door is thrown open, and all the long, illustrious procession of the noblest in the land enter, and they lay the body of the king on a table, for he has got to give his own consent, as it were, before they will admit that he is dead—silence gives consent, they say.
So after all are gone the Lord Chamberlain lifts the heavey, gold-embroidered pall, and kneelin’ down by the side of his royal master, looks long in his face to see if he recognizes him. But he don’t. He lays cold and still as marble.