A great deal takes place at a country funeral characteristic of the kindly as well as the weaker side of rustic men and women. There is much bustle and subdued cheerfulness mingled with awe; conversation is carried on in whispers. The chief mourners are permitted to be as helpless as they please; everything is done for them; they are treated as automatons. They are arranged in ranks next to the corpse according to consanguinity. Then come the neighbors and those persons who love to attend funerals. Children bring up the rear and in the hall and doorway lean a few men who seem to have no particular relation to the occasion. The important personage, not excepting the minister, is the volunteer undertaker, who for some unknown reason, has become the man usually called upon to officiate at the exercises. He knows his business, and for an hour feels himself a man of consequence. He is impartial in his attentions; be the dead old or young, saint or sinner, he is equally anxious that the ceremonies shall be conducted with proper decency and order. The rich give him a little more care, as they, perhaps, have rendered unto their dead a handsomer outfit for their last appearance and farewell journey; such I think may have been the case when our distinguished neighbors, the Scammels and Pennimans passed away. When the minister has concluded his remarks and his prayer, generally in the most lugubrious words and scriptural phrases he can muster, the man in charge of the funeral, (for country people knew no such professional name as undertaker), comes briskly forward, and, with much ceremony, lifts the lid of the coffin, rearranges some portion of the dress about the face of the dead, gives a searching glance over the coffin and then announces: "The friends and all those who desire, may now view the 'remains'". This is the most affecting moment in the ceremony; the last parting look which wrings the heart of the stoutest, when the women break down and are led away blinded by their tears. It is then that the most indifferent spectator pays that beautiful tribute of weeping for those he may not have loved, nay, hated or despised. All the ill is forgotten, the good alone remembered. A hearse was hardly known in the old days. The coffin was placed on a bier of home construction and carried to the graveyard on the shoulders of four men. The sad funeral procession followed behind, the mourners walking two and two and the rear made up of a straggling company of men, women and children. The minister offered a farewell prayer at the grave, and in summer time, an appropriate hymn was sung, its appropriateness consisting mostly in its dismal words and tune. Then the terrible moment arrived, the lowering of the coffin and the sound of the first earth upon it; for, formerly the company awaited this last act. This was not the formal dust to dust, a verbal and figurative act, but some shovelfuls of real earth that for a