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Updated: September 19, 2025
The air was intensely hot; the drooping leaves of the China trees were motionless; there was not a breath of wind stirring; and the sable plumes of the hearses were still as their burdens. The brazen, glittering sky seemed a huge glowing furnace, breathing out only scorching heat.
Meantime, here and there, like awaiting hearses, the coal-scows drifted along, poled broadside, pell-mell to the current. And as that tide in the water swept all craft on, so a like tide seemed hurrying all men, all horses, all vehicles on the land.
John Martin arrived, the open ground fronting the cemetery was one enormous mass of the processionists, while behind on the road leading up to this point thousands were to be seen moving slowly forward to the strains of the "Dead March," given out by the bands immediately in front of the hearses. On the arrival of the procession at the cemetery Mr. Martin was hailed with loud applause.
To think that a man with half a million of money could die and be got rid of with so little parade! What money could do in a moderate way was done. The coffin was as heavy as lead could make it. The cloth of the best. The plate upon it was of silver, or looked like it. There was no room for an equipage of hearses and black coaches, the house was so unfortunately near to the churchyard.
Vansittart, rising from her seat, walked down to the main pathway, which commanded an uninterrupted view. That which had attracted Cornish's attention was a funeral, cheap, sordid, and obscure, which moved slowly across the Oude Weg by the road, crossing it at right angles. It was a peculiar funeral, inasmuch as it consisted of three hearses and one mourning carriage.
Hello, here are some of the Bledsoes, and if you will give me a lift with this tombstone I guess I will join company and jog along with them mighty respectable old family, the Bledsoes, and used to always come out in six-horse hearses and all that sort of thing fifty years ago when I walked these streets in daylight. Good-by, friend."
The passing of a funeral in our English streets is so common a sight that hearses and plumes and mutes and carriages filled with relatives garbed in crape have almost ceased to remind us that our dust too is on the way to the graveyard; and it is not until we catch sight of a man walking in the carriage way carrying a brown box under his arm that we start like someone suddenly stung and remember the mystery of life and death.
And whence came they? From back-yards and bar-rooms; from out of the custom-houses, marshals' offices, post-offices, and gambling-hells; from the President's house, the jail, the station-house; from unnamed by-places, where devilish disunion was hatch'd at midnight; from political hearses, and from the coffins inside, and from the shrouds inside of the coffins; from the tumors and abscesses of the land; from the skeletons and skulls in the vaults of the federal almshouses; and from the running sores of the great cities.
And then across the shadowy realm of dreams there swept the slow solemn progress of a funeral cortege plumed hearses, blacker than blackest night; innumerable horses, with funereal trappings and plumed headgear waving in an icy wind; long trains of shrouded figures stretching on into infinite space, in spectral procession that knew neither beginning nor end.
These classes vied in their efforts to prick holes in the continental decrees. Bargees and women, dogs and hearses, were pressed into service against Napoleon.
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