"
"Yeh? You're a good guy, Dominie," said Mr. Hines in his emotionless
voice.
I took him home with me to sleep. But we did not sleep. We smoked.
Minnie Munn's funeral morning dawned clear and fresh. No word came from
Bartholomew Storrs. I tried to find him, but without avail.
"We'll go through with it," said Mr. Hines quietly.
How small and insignificant seemed our tiny God's Acre, as the few
mourners crept into it behind Minnie Munn's body; the gravestones like
petty dots upon the teeming earth, dwarfed by the overshadowing
tenements, as if death were but an incident in the vast, unhasting,
continuous sweep of life, as indeed perhaps it is. Then the grandeur of
the funeral service, which links death to immortality, was bodied forth
in the aged minister's trembling voice, and by it the things which are
of life were dwarfed to nothingness. But my uneasy mind refused to be
bound by the words; it was concerned with Bartholomew Storrs, standing
grim, haggard, inscrutable, beside the grave, his eyes upturned and
waiting. Too well I knew for what he was waiting; his sign. So, too, did
Mr. Hines, still hard, still pink, still impeccably tailored, and still
clinging to his elegant lacquered cane, as he supported little, broken
Mr. Munn, very pathetic and decorous in full black, even to the gloves.
The sonorous beauty and simplicity of the rite suddenly checked,
faltered.
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