THIS STORE IS CLOSED TILL FURTHER NOTICE. SHERIFF. CHAPTER XVIII. THE DEPARTED ROOSTER--THE GROCERY MAN DISCOURSES ON DEATH-- THE DEAD ROOSTER--A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH--THE TENDERNESS BETWEEN THE ROOSTER AND HIS FAITHFUL HEN--THE HEN RETIRES TO SET--THE CHICKENS!--THE PROUD ROOSTER DIES--THE FICKLE HEN FLIRTING IN INDECENT HASTE. “Why don't you take an ice pick and clean the dirt out from under your finger nails?” said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came in the store and stroked the cat the wrong way as she lay in the sun on the counter, on a quire of manilla paper. “Can't remove the dirt for thirty days--it is an emblem of mourning. Had a funeral at our house, yesterday;” and the boy took a pickle out of a tub and put it in the cat's mouth, and shut her teeth together on it, and then went to the show case, while the grocery man whose back had been turned during the pickle exercise, thought by the way the cat jumped into the dried apple barrel, and began to paw and scratch with all four of her feet, and yowl, that she was going to have a fit. “I hadn't heard about it,” said the grocery man, as he took the cat by the neck and tossed her out in the back shed into an old oyster box full of sawdust, with a parting injunction that if she was going to have fits she better go out where there was plenty of fresh air. “Death is always a sad thing to contemplate. One day we are full of health, and joy, and cold victuals, and the next we are screwed down in a box, a few words are said over our remains, a few tears are shed, and there is a race to see who shall get back from the cemetery first; and though we may think we are an important factor in the world's progress, and sometimes feel as though it would be unable to put up margins and have to stop the deal, the world goes right along, and it must annoy people who die to realize that they don't count for game. The greatest man in the world is only a nine spot when he is dead, because somebody else takes the tricks the dead man ought to have taken. But, say, who is dead at your house?”