CHAPTER XXX

FUNERAL OF A BABY

Following out the instinct planted so deeply in human nature for
treating with the utmost care and at great expense when dead those, who,
when alive, have been served with careless parsimony, there started
from the door of No. 1 in Hound Street a funeral procession of three
four-wheeled cabs. The first bore the little coffin, on which lay a
great white wreath (gift of Cecilia and Thyme). The second bore Mrs.
Hughs, her son Stanley, and Joshua Creed. The third bore Martin Stone.
In the first cab Silence was presiding with the scent of lilies over him
who in his short life had made so little noise, the small grey shadow
which had crept so quietly into being, and, taking his chance when he
was not noticed, had crept so quietly out again. Never had he felt so
restful, so much at home, as in that little common coffin, washed as he
was to an unnatural whiteness, and wrapped in his mother's only spare
sheet. Away from all the strife of men he was Journeying to a greater
peace. His little aloe-plant had flowered; and, between the open windows
of the only carriage he had ever been inside, the wind--which, who
knows? he had perhaps become--stirred the fronds of fern and the flowers
of his funeral wreath. Thus he was going from that world where all men
were his brothers.

From the second cab the same wind was rigidly excluded, and there was
silence, broken by the aged butler's breathing. Dressed in his Newmarket