“Dix, and Nawby--the medical attendant of the deceased, and the solicitor who is her sole executor,” said the voice near Mat, in tones which had ceased to be gently inquisitive, and had become complacently explanatory instead. “That’s Millbury the undertaker, and the other is Gutteridge of the White Hart Inn, his brother-in-law, who supplies the refreshments, which in my opinion makes a regular job of it,” continued the voice, as two red-faced gentlemen followed the doctor and the lawyer. “Something like a funeral, this! Not a halfpenny less than forty pound, I should say, when it’s all paid for. Beautiful, ain’t it?” concluded the voice, becoming gently inquisitive again. Still Mat kept his eyes fixed on the funeral proceedings in front, and took not the smallest notice of the pertinacious speaker behind him. The coffin was placed in the hearse. Dr. Dix and Mr. Nawby entered the mourning coach provided for them. The smug human vultures who prey commercially on the civilized dead, arranged themselves, with black wands, in solemn Undertakers’ order of procession on either side of the funeral vehicles. Those clumsy pomps of feathers and velvet, of strutting horses and marching mutes, which are still permitted among us to desecrate with grotesquely-shocking fiction the solemn fact of death, fluttered out in their blackest state grandeur and showed their most woeful state paces, as the procession started magnificently with its meager offering of one dead body more to the bare and awful grave. When Mary Grice died, a fugitive and an outcast, the clown’s wife and the Irish girl who rode in the circus wept for her, stranger though she was, as they followed her coffin to the poor corner of the churchyard. When Joanna Grice died in the place of her birth, among the townspeople with whom her whole existence had been passed, every eye was tearless that looked on her funeral procession; the two strangers who made part of it, gossiped pleasantly as they rode after the hearse about the news of the morning; and the sole surviving member of her family, whom chance had brought to her door on her burial-day, stood aloof from the hired mourners, and moved not a step to follow her to the grave. No: not a step. The hearse rolled on slowly towards the churchyard, and the sight-seers in the lane followed it; but Matthew Grice stood by the garden paling, at the place where he had halted from the first. What was her death to him? Nothing but the loss of his first chance of tracing Arthur Carr. Tearlessly and pitilessly she had left it to strangers to bury her brother’s daughter; and now, tearlessly and pitilessly, there stood her brother’s son, leaving it to strangers to bury _her._ “Don’t you mean to follow to the churchyard, and see the last of it?” inquired the same inquisitive voice, which had twice already endeavored to attract Mat’s attention.