Then he cries, “Señor! Señor! Señor!” and waits for a reply. But as no answer comes, he sez—
“His Majesty does not answer! then indeed the king is dead!”
So he takes the wand of office—the septer, I spoze—and breaks it over the coffin in token of a power that has ceased to be. Then he locks the marble coffin, hands the key to the Prior of the Monastery, and they go up the long steps and leave the king to sleep with his own folks.
It must have been a sight to see it go on.
Why, a mourner who undertook sech doin’s in Jonesville or Loontown would find himself lugged off to the loonatick asylum, or have threats on’t. But the ways of countries differ—I didn’t make any moves to break it up. I am very liberal minded, and then I meditated that it wuzn’t my funeral.
What made me say that a mourner in Jonesville couldn’t do sech a thing wuz owin’ to a incident that came under my own observation.
A man that lived in the outskirts of Jonesville, havin’ moved down there from Zoar, got it into his head that he wuz goin’ to die on a certain day at two o’clock in the afternoon.
So what should that creeter do but write his own funeral sermon, and gin out the word that he would preach it at one o’clock sharp. Because he wuz to die at two precisely.
He got his coffin made, his wife got her mournin’ clothes all done, for he wuz so dead sure of the result that he had converted her to his belief. So at one o’clock exactly the crowd gathered to see the corpse, as you may say, preach its own funeral sermon.
The coffin wuz in the parlor, the mourners come down from upstairs, some on ’em weepin’ bitterly, and headed by the body, dressed in its shroud, bearin’ its own funeral sermon.