The mourners wuz arranged in orderly rows round the room (he wuz wide connected), and the body stood by the head of the coffin and preached a long sermon.
He touched on the sins of his hearers, and of course they couldn’t resent it in him, bein’ a corpse’s last thoughts, as you may say.
He bore down hard on ’em, specially his relations—the more distant ones, cousins and sech, and kinder rubbed up his bretheren and sistern some.
But to his wife he spoke words of tenderness, and in a touchin’ and fervent manner spoke of what she had lost. He praised himself up to the highest notch, and his wife sobbed out loud, and she had to be fanned on both sides by a circuit minister and his wife, who wuz present; and she sed to ’em that she had never mistrusted before what a prize she had in her pardner.
He then warned his children to grow up as nigh like their father as they could conveniently, and he got ’em to sniffin’ and wipin’ their noses. He then addressed the community, tellin’ ’em of their sinful ways, and exhorted ’em to turn round and do better, and sed to ’em a few words of consolation about the great blessin’ they had lost.
And then he folded his shroud around him with one hand, and with quite a lot of dignity he stepped up into a chair, and so into his coffin. Then he laid down, arranged the folds of his shroud and crossed his hands on his bosom and shet his eyes up. As he did so the clock struck two. He laid a minute, while a dumbfoundered look swep’ over his liniment, and anon a sheepish one. And then he lifted up his head and looked round, and sez he—
“There must be some mistake.”
And one of the cousins, one he had rasped down the hardest (they wuz at swords’ pints anyway, caused by line fences), he hollered out—
“Yes, I should think there wuz, you dum fool you! gittin’ us all here right in hayin’ time to hear your dum funeral sermon.”
And another one he had reviled yelled out—