We went through the front door into the big, lonesome-lookin’ hall, the light comin’ through fanlights by the side and over the door with narrer green paper curtains in front of ’em. The parlor and settin’ room wuz to each side of the hall, and to the end of it wuz a big, old-fashioned kitchen, part of it carpeted, which they used for a winter dining room; the summer kitchen wuz back on’t. The chairs wuz all put in the parlor—where the body wuz—for the family to set on, and in the settin’ room and kitchen long boards wuz put, the ends layin’ on kags and sap buckets. And the neighbors had filled these seats full, for in such lonesome neighborhoods a funeral is about the only break in the monotony of life, and they are attended with avidity.
Jest as we went in the hall Hamen and his wife come down the front stairs. She wuz dressed in deep black from head to foot, and had a long crape veil she had borrowed for the occasion over her face, and a black-bordered handkerchief. She looked real smart, havin’ forgot herself and her various diseases in the sad excitement of the occasion. Alzina follered her, dressed in a dark alpacky, her usual dress which she wore whilst she wuz tuggin’ along takin’ care of the deceased day and night; but her eyes wuz red and swelled up with weepin’, and she wuz real pale. I wuz sorry for Alzina. Anna and Cicero follered, and then the other married sister and her children, and then Grandma Bodley’s brother’s family, and other distant relations. I laid out to fall into the procession long to the last of it, but at the last minute I missed Josiah, and found him in the settin’ room settin’ on a board near the door, and I whispered to him and told him to come on into the parlor.
And he whispered back, “I told you I wuzn’t goin’ to mourn much, and I hain’t.” I couldn’t move him no more than I could the board he wuz settin’ on. But for the sake of decency and on Jack’s account I went into the parlor with him, but I sot down pretty nigh the door so as to compromise between my partner and duty.
Well, the sermon wuz pretty long, but scriptural, no doubt; it was a bashful young preacher, and his first funeral sermon, almost his first sermon at all; and then I guess the singin’ onnerved him—it wuz dretful. The hymn wuz Grandma Bodley’s favorite, and chose by Alzina:
“There is a calm for those who weep,
A rest for weary pilgrims found.
They calmly lie and sweetly sleep,
Low in the ground, low in the ground.”
But all the while they wuz singin’ I kep’ on thinkin’ that Grandma Bodley wuz too good a woman and too good a Christian to have such singin’ over her. It sot all the mourners off to cryin’, and no wonder. They had a squeaky old melodeon that Tamer learned to play on when she wuz a child, and a neighborin’ girl that played by ear played on it; and the singers bein’ picked up that day as they come in from different townships, they flatted and sharped them poor hims in a way that wuz perfectly dretful; but I thought to myself, poor Grandma has got where she can’t hear it, and this word come right into my mind, “Blessed are the dead.”