When I have waited a little while at a place which has recently been added for the graves of poor people, the great black motor coach, splashed with mud, appears suddenly out of the city and enters one of the small stone gateways at the southeastern corner. There is a stone lodge there, and a bell over the gates tolls briefly as the coach comes in. Then the vehicle follows a road parallel to a lonely bare wet red-paved street outside, in which long dingy trolley cars pass at intervals; and comes quickly to where I am. The sand here is entirely bare; the few old forest trees are neglected; and the graves lie in long close rows. They have no stones, but there are dead rotten flowers on some of the newest, fluttering forlornly from cardboard frames wound with lead foil and adorned with letters of crinkly purple paper. Some graves have been covered with white cotton cloth fastened to the ground by pegs; but that is all. Ragged rotten brown leaves lie in the hollows of the sand, where brown weeds stand; and wet newspapers are blown about by the cold wind. In this shabby somber place on the dun earth of the boundless lake country, beside the harsh ugly city in which he has been an unwelcome stranger, but under the great white sky, too, the body of the servant of God is to be laid. The coach stops in the muddy road, and the escort, all negroes except the undertaker and his agile assistant, descend in the mist. Those who are to carry the coffin gather uncertainly, and with the assistance of the undertaker and his man take it down. Then an irregular procession is formed, the bearers take off their hats, and slowly and stumblingly all move off up the slope on a mat of tan jute with two red stripes, that has been laid on the mud, and make their way among the graves. Shabby, ordinary people in their greatcoats and hats of different dull colors, with their umbrellas and rubber storm shoes, no one of them is much moved as they creep with their dead man like tiny worms on the yellow sand beneath the sky. When the poor black coffin has been put down on the canvas bands of the wooden frame around the grave, all stand back quietly while something that I cannot hear at my distance is read or said. Some of the women sob out then. The coffin descends slowly from sight into the damp yellow sand. Out at a distance over the swampy fields beyond the stream, large black crows flap noisily around a lone tree; from a tiny locomotive on railway trackage far away white steam rises with a faint roar. The mist in the air is rapidly turning to falling rain.