By-and-bye, there came a hearse and four, and then two carriages and four; and on the tops of ’em, and on all the horses’ heads, were plumes of feathers, hired at so much per plume; and everything, horses and all, was covered over with black velvet, till you couldn’t see it. Because there were not feathers enough yet, there was a fellow in the procession carrying a board of ’em on his head, like Italian images; and there were about five-and-twenty or thirty other fellows (all hot and red in the face with eating and drinking) dressed up in scarves and hatbands, and carrying—shut-up fishing-rods, I believe—who went draggling through the mud, in a manner that I thought would be the death of me; while the “Black Jobmaster”—that’s what he calls himself—who had let the coaches and horses to a furnishing undertaker, who had let ’em to a haberdasher, who had let ’em to a carpenter, who had let ’em to the parish-clerk, who had let ’em to the sexton, who had let ’em to the plumber painter and glazier, who had got the funeral to do, looked out of the public-house window at the corner, with his pipe in his mouth, and said—for I heard him—“that was the sort of turn-out to do a gen-teel party credit.” That! As if any two-and-sixpenny masquerade, tumbled into a vat of blacking, wouldn’t be quite as solemn, and immeasurably cheaper! Do you think I don’t know you? You’re mistaken if you think so. But perhaps you do. Well! Shall I tell you what I know? Can you bear it? Here it is then. The Black Jobmaster is right. The root of all this, is the gen-teel party. You don’t mean to deny it, I hope? You don’t mean to tell me that this nonsensical mockery isn’t owing to your gentility. Don’t I know a Raven in a Cathedral Tower, who has often heard your service for the Dead? Don’t I know that you almost begin it with the words, “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out”? Don’t I know that in a monstrous satire on those words, you carry your hired velvets, and feathers, and scarves, and all the rest of it, to the edge of the grave, and get plundered (and serve you right!) in every article, because you WILL be gen-teel parties to the last?