ts....

I spare you Gertrude's funeral, and Miss Goucher's. The latter, held in
a small, depressingly official mortuary chapel, provided--at a price--by
the undertaker, was attended only by Phil, Jimmy, Susan, Sonia, Miss
O'Neill and me. Oh--there was also the Episcopal clergyman, whom I
provided. He read the burial service professionally, but well; it is
difficult to read it badly. There are a few sequences of words that
really are foolproof, carrying their own atmosphere and dignity with
them.

Phil and I, at Susan's request, had examined Miss Goucher's effects and
had made certain inquiries. She had been for many years, we found,
entirely alone in the world--a phrase often, but seldom accurately,
used. It is a rare thing, happily, to discover a human being who is
absolutely the last member of his or her family line; in Miss Goucher's
case this aloneness was complete. But so far as her nonexistent
ancestors were concerned, Miss Goucher, we ascertained, had every
qualification necessary for a D. A. R.; forebears of hers had lived for
generations in an old homestead near Poughkeepsie, and the original
Ithiel Goucher had fought as a young officer under Washington. From
soldiering, the Gouchers had passed on to farming, to saving souls, to
school-teaching, to patent-medicine peddling, and finally to drink and
drugs and general desuetude. Miss Goucher herself had been a last
flare-up of the primitive family virtues, and with her they were now
extinct.

All this we learned from her papers, and from an old lady in
Poughkeepsie who remembered her grandfather, and so presumably her
mother and father as well--though in reply to my letter of inquiry she
forbore to mention them. They were mentioned several times in letters
and legal documents preserved by Miss Goucher, but--except to say that
they both died before she was sixteen--I shall follow the example of the
old lady in Poughkeepsie. She, I feel, and the Roman poet long before
her, had what Jimmy calls the "right idea."...

Miss Goucher, always methodical, left a brief and characteristic will:
"To Susan Blake, ward of Ambrose Hunt, Esq., of New Haven, Conn., and to
her heirs and assigns forever, I leave what little personal property I
possess. She has been to me more than a daughter. I desire to be
cremated, believing that to be the cleanest and least troublesome method
of disposing of the dead."

That, with the proper legal additions, was all. Her desire was of cours