Swiss Funerals.
This is a solemn subject to write about, but the funerals in Switzerland, at least in the part of Switzerland I know, are so strange that I think it may interest the Table to hear about them. In the first place, when a person dies a notice is put in the paper, always with a deep black margin around it. Here is one I translated from a German paper.
Death Notice.
To sympathetic relations, friends, and acquaintances, we here announce the sad news that our much-beloved husband, grandfather, father, brother, brother-in-law, and uncle,
Mr. Friedrich Karl Muller,
Surgeon,
departed this life in his sixtieth year, after much suffering, and blessed with the comfort of our holy religion.
For quiet sympathy beg,
St. Gall, the 25th of December, 1895,
The deeply mourning wife,
Maria Muller, née Fuchs,
Fanny, her daughter,
in the name of all the relations.
The mourning urn will be exhibited from
1.30 till 4 o'clock p.m.
You will perhaps wonder what a mourning urn is. In front of the house where the person died there is placed a little black table, covered with a black cloth, on which stands a large black jar. Into this the friends and acquaintances of the family drop little black-margined visiting-cards, sometimes with a few words of sympathy on them. The urn is put out on the table on the day of the funeral.
No one except gentlemen ever go to the church-yard, and they generally follow the hearse on foot, though sometimes carriages are used. The horses that draw the hearse have long black cloaks on, with places cut out for them to see through. One custom I like is that whenever a gentleman sees a funeral passing him, he takes off his hat until it has gone by, whether he knew the dead person or not.
The graveyards over here are very different from the American ones. None have separate lots belonging to their family, but persons are buried according to the year in which they died. For instance, I once had a French governess who walked with me to the cemetery one day. She happened to remember that her grandfather died in 1879, and found his grave immediately, but we had the greatest hunt for the place where her grandmother was buried, as the date of her death had escaped mademoiselle's memory. I have forgotten the exact date myself, but I remember that we at last discovered her grave in quite another part of the cemetery, as she died while young, and was buried in the rows for 1867 or 1868. I must confess I think this custom very disagreeable, and like our American way much better.
Marian Greene, R.T.F.
For the Natural History Club.
There have been living in an old willow-tree in our yard this winter six very dark colored birds, the size of a robin, with long slender bills. They have a whistle call very much like the mockingbird, and have only shown themselves on very warm days early in the morning. They evidently get their food from a neighboring chicken-pen. We have been here fifteen years and have never seen these little guests before. I should like some one interested in ornithology to see them and tell me how they happened here.
L. E. B.
Yonkers, N. Y.