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At night the clergy assembled, each bearing a torch, and with one voice chanted the Miserere, and other penitential psalms and prayers, while the church-bells rang out the 'broken funeral-knell.
Like a funeral-knell, this despairing chant haunted him, now that he was in bed, prostrated by fever and agitated by an anxiety so much the more inappeasable for the fact that he could not discover its cause. He ended by abandoning himself to the torrent of anguishes suddenly dammed by the chant of psalms slowly rising in his tortured head.
"On my honor," replied the gentleman, "I believe the bell has the good taste to toll of its own accord. What has she to do with weddings? If you, dearest Julia, were approaching the altar, the bell would ring out its merriest peal. It has only a funeral-knell for her."
It is not an exaggeration to say that, in ten thousand Southern homes, tears came to the eyes not only of women, but of bearded men, and that the words, "Lee is dead!" fell like a funeral-knell upon every heart.
And it has been the custom of divers nations to infuse something of sadness into their marriage ceremonies, so to keep death in mind while contracting that engagement which is life's chiefest business. Thus we may draw a sad but profitable moral from this funeral-knell."
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