While Zedekiah was meditating on the deficiency, the grave but impassioned Abigail, marked with the grime of her avocations, made her appearance in the stable. Here was a bearer for him every way suitable. Zedekiah, transported with joy, greeted her eagerly, and at once explained to her how he was situated. But it required all his rhetoric, supported by his entreaties, to remove her objection to undertake the office he proposed to her; and it was not till he consented, in requital, to aid her in the matter of the onion, which she considered far more weighty and important, that he was able to win her to his purpose. Her compliance once gained, the broom and horse-cloth, arranged in due form, were raised to her shoulder, and she set out for the grave. Zedekiah followed, “with solemn step and slow,” and with a dirty napkin, as a substitute for a handkerchief, raised to his lugubrious visage. A funereal pace being maintained, the mournful procession progressed but slowly; but as the grave, though on the extreme confines of the yard, was no great distance from the stable, it shortly arrived thither. As it drew up at the brink of the grave, Zedekiah’s grief became excessive; and several minutes more elapsed, to the manifest irritation of Abigail, before he could finally resolve himself to consign the poor broom to its last home. Then, having stripped it of the horse-cloth, he lifted it carefully from Abigail’s shoulder, and lowered it into the grave. The solemn moment of final separation had now arrived; and Zedekiah, to all appearance, felt it severely. But after one passionate outburst, his composure gradually returned; and he proceeded, in a whining tone, and with a stern expression of countenance, to utter his last farewell, in these words:-- “Ashes to ashes, And dust to dust! If death don’t keep thee, The devil must!” The funeral thus despatched, the afflicted chief mourner, pursuant to the arrangement already set forth, was obliged to tear himself away from the grave, and enter on the design enforced on him by Abigail. Resolved to carry that design into execution, he forthwith accompanied Abigail, who was heartily weary of mourning, and glad to escape, to the kitchen, and prepared to order himself as she should direct. But both he and Abigail were unexpectedly interrupted in their project. As the latter was deliberating, according to her custom on such occasions, how they could best proceed, they were confounded by the entrance of Shedlock. His face was as pale as death; his eyes were almost starting from their sockets; and he appeared, at first sight, to be hardly able to stand. His two domestics gazed on him with a feeling of awe; and the communication that he was about to make to them, and which we shall have to record hereafter, was not calculated to compose them. CHAPTER III.