Not necessarily on his next appearance in a settlement is the preacher requested to conduct the funeral service of persons deceased since his last visit. The matter is arranged with more of deliberation. A date is set some time ahead and word is sent to distant friends.[8] After a time of general sickness such as had visited Pigeon Creek in the epidemic of the "milk sick," Parson Elkin may have had several funerals to preach in the same cemetery or at the schoolhouse nearest at hand. I have known a half-dozen funerals to be included in one sermon with full biographical particulars of each decedent and detailed descriptions of all the deathbed scenes, together with rapturous forecasts of the future bliss of the good people who were dead and abundant warnings of the flaming hell that awaited their impenitent neighbors. Even those people who had not been noted for their piety during life were almost invariably slipped into heaven through a deathbed repentance or by grace of the uncovenanted mercies of God. It is the business of all preachers to be very stern with the living and very charitable toward the dead.[9] I must add a further word about the custom of deferred funerals. Although the burial was conducted without religious service, it was not permitted to be celebrated in neglect. The news that a man was dying would bring the sympathetic neighbors from miles around, and horses would be tied up the creek and down while people waited in friendly sorrow and conversed in hushed voices in the presence of the solemn dignity of death. That night a group of neighbors would "sit up" with the dead, and keep the family awake with frequent and lugubrious song. Next day the grave must be dug; and that required a considerable part of the male population of the settlement. If only two or three men came in the morning they would sit and wait for others and go home for the dinner and come back. It thus has happened more than once in my experience that we have brought the body to the burial and have had to wait an hour or more in sun or wind for the finishing of the digging of the grave.