After the Scottish fashion at a funeral, greetings were freely passed, and Reid, who hadna’ seen his friend Mackinder since the time of the Mid-Lanark fight, greeted him with “Ye mind when first Keir Hardie was puttin’ up for Parliament,” and wrung his hand, hardened in the mine, with one as hardened, and instantly began to recall elections of the past. “Ye mind yon Wishaw meeting?” “Aye, ou aye; ye mean when a’ they Irish wouldna’ hear John Ferguson. Man, he almost grat after the meeting aboot it.” “Aye, but they gied Hardie himself a maist respectful hearing . . . aye, ou aye.” Others remembered him a boy, and others in his home at Cumnock, but all spoke of him with affection, holding him as something of their own, apart from other politicians, almost apart from men. Old comrades who had been with him either at this election or that meeting, had helped or had intended to have helped at the crises of his life, fought their old battles over, as they tramped along, all shivering in the wind. The procession reached a long dip in the road, and the head of it, full half a mile away, could be seen gathered round the hearse, outside the chapel of the crematorium, whose ominous tall chimney, through which the ashes, and perchance the souls of thousands have escaped towards some empyrean or another, towered up starkly. At last all had arrived, and the small open space was crowded, the hearse and carriages appearing stuck amongst the people, like raisins in a cake, so thick they pressed upon them. The chapel, differing from the ordinary chapel of the faiths as much as does a motor driver from a cabman, had an air as of modernity about it, which contrasted strangely with the ordinary looking crowd, the adjacent hills, the decent mourning coaches and the black-coated undertakers who bore the coffin up the steps. Outside, the wind whistled and swayed the soot-stained trees about; but inside the chapel the heat was stifling. When all was duly done, and long exordiums passed upon the man who in his life had been the target for the abuse of press and pulpit, the coffin slid away to its appointed place. One thought one heard the roaring of the flames, and somehow missed the familiar lowering of the body . . . earth to earth . . . to which the centuries of use and wont have made us all familiar, though dust to dust in this case was the more appropriate. In either case, the book is closed for ever, and the familiar face is seen no more.