‘It is a bad case—very bad,’ said he to the country doctor, who had explained to him all the particulars of the accident. ‘It is a very bad case, but I think science is equal to the emergency. I suppose we must have an operation. I have brought my assistant with me, and my case of instruments. We’d better begin at once.’ Turning to look at the insensible patient, the great Sir Henry exclaimed: ‘I have come down for nothing; Sir Watkin is dead!’ CHAPTER XXIII THE FUNERAL. ‘Worldly people,’ wrote one of our greatest novelists, ‘never look so worldly as at a funeral.’ The truth of this was very apparent at the funeral of the deceased Baronet. There was the usual parade of outward grief at the churchyard, and in the town all the blinds were drawn down and the shops shut—with the exception of those set apart for the sale of beer and wine and spirits, which were rather better patronized than usual. It is said grief makes men thirsty. That certainly was the case at Sloville, for the usual topers of the place had been increased in number by the addition of numerous thirsty souls from all the adjacent country, drawn together not so much by grief as by a pardonable curiosity. Heavily tolled the bell of the old-fashioned church, in the gloomy vaults of which slept the family ancestors, whose varied virtues were recorded in marble in all parts of the building, and whose rotting carcases poisoned the atmosphere of the place, and had done so for many generations. When are we going to reform this and to cremate our dead, so that we may go to church in safety and with no fear of detriment to our physical well-being? The ancients burnt their dead. Is there any earthly reason why we moderns should not do the same? I know none, except a stupid prejudice unworthy of a generation that loves to think itself enlightened, and that flatters itself it is wiser than any that has gone before. If it is to be talked of after death, surely the urn can be as fitting a remembrance of the departed as the costly and cumbrous marble monument, with its deception and untruth. ‘Five languages,’ writes Sir Thomas Brown, of Norwich, ‘secured not the epitaph of Gordianus. The man of God lives longer without a tomb than any by one visibly interred by angels, and adjudged to obscurity, though not without some marks directing human decency. Enoch and Elias, without either tomb or burial, in an anomalous state of being, are the great examples of perpetuity in their long and living memory, in strict account being still on this side death and having a late part yet to act upon the stage of earth.’ In vain is all earthly vanity, but there is no vanity so vain as that connected with the grave. ‘Yet man is a noble animal,’ as the same writer remarks, ‘splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave!’