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The traveller at length reached the fir-tree, which from the middle upward was covered with living branches, although a scaffold had been erected beneath, and other preparations made for the work of death. Under this unhappy tree, which in after times was believed to drop poison with its dew, sat the one solitary mourner for innocent blood.
But Delme gave a quick impetuous motion of the hand, which the domestic understood well; and the horses' heads were turned towards the metropolis. The mourner tarried not, even to bid his sister farewell; but sought once more his brother's grave. Some friendly hand had kept its turf smooth; no footsteps, save the innocent ones of children, had pressed its grassy mound.
"Ah, then I must have some of them; and I will ask you to send me a box," said Longfellow, and he wrote down his name and address. The cigar-dealer read it with the smile of a worsted champion, and said, "Well, I guess you had me, that time." At a funeral a mourner wished to open conversation, and by way of suggesting a theme of common interest, began, "You've buried, I believe?"
"So shall it not be with thy child, bloody sorceress," replied the female mourner, whose passions were as violent as those of Elspat herself. "The ravens shall tear his fair hair to line their nests, before the sun sinks beneath the Treshornish islands." These words recalled to Elspat's mind the whole history of the last three dreadful days.
At the funeral next day it looked to us, though the parents of the little one were there, as if the chief mourner was not, for the Major was absent. Indeed, he was not at the hotel during the day, and it was late in the evening before he came home. He still had the dress suit on, but the bouquet was gone. It needed no one tell us on what little mound of earth it had been left.
"It is Lahnar," answered a female: "Lahnar, your neighbour, seeks to give Urad comfort, and to condole with the distressed mourner of a mother and a friend." "Lahnar," answered Urad, "is then a friend to the afflicted, and kindly seeks to alleviate the sorrows of the wretched Urad." She then opened the door, and Lahnar entered with a basket on her head.
Little did the austere Abbess, who was the chief mourner at these obsequies, guess that the actor Miraudin, whose grave had been hastily dug in Rome, had also a right to be laid in the same marble vault; proud and cold and stern as her heart had grown through long years of pain and disappointment, it is possible that had she known this, her sufferings might have been still more poignant.
The father in the middle of the night went out to mourn for his child. While he leant against the scaffold weeping, he saw a man watching him. The stranger did not appear to be a Dahcotah, and the mourner was alarmed, and returned to the camp. In the morning he told the Indians of the circumstance, and they raised the camp and went into the pine country.
Mourning garments have this use, that they are a shield to the real mourner, and they are often a curtain of respectability to the person who should be a mourner but is not. We shall therefore borrow from the best English and American authorities what we believe to be the most recent usages in the etiquette of mourning.
She spoke not, but at this assurance turned her tearful eyes upon him, with a beam of delight; with such delight, the vestal consigns herself to the cloister; with such delight, the widowed mourner lays her head to rest on the tomb of him she loved.
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