but I should like to make my last home in the heart of a
crowded city, or, better still, in one of those social homes of the
dead, which the Turks, with a philosophy so beautiful and so poetical,
make their most cheerful resort. Singularly enough, Christians seem to
delight in rendering death particularly hideous, and graveyards
decidedly disagreeable. I, on the contrary, would "plant the latter
with laurels, and sprinkle it with lilies." I would wreathe "sleep's
pale brother" so thickly with roses that even those rabid moralists who
think that it makes us better to paint him as a dreadful fiend, instead
of a loving friend, could see nothing but their blushing radiance. I
would alter the whole paraphernalia of the coffin, the shroud, and the
bier, particularly the first, which, as Dickens says, "looks like a
high-shouldered ghost with its hands in its breeches-pockets." Why
should we endeavor to make our entrance into a glorious immortality so
unutterably ghastly? Let us glide into the "fair shadowland" through a
"gate of flowers," if we may no longer, as in the majestic olden time,
aspire heavenward on the wings of perfumed flame.

How oddly do life and death jostle each other in this strange world of
ours! How nearly allied are smiles and tears! My eyes were yet moist
from the egotistical _pitie de moi-meme_ in which I had been indulging
at the thought of sleeping forever amid these lonely hills, which in a
few years must return to their primeval solitude, perchance never again
to be awakened by the voice of humanity, when the Chileno procession,
every member of it most intensely drunk, really _did_ appear. I never
saw anything more diverting than the whole affair. Of course, _selon
les regles_, I ought to have been shocked and horrified, to have shed
salt tears, and have uttered melancholy jeremiads over their miserable
degradation; but the world is so full of platitudes, my dear, that I
think you will easily forgive me for not boring you with a temperance
lecture, and will good-naturedly let me have my laugh, and not think me
_very_ wicked, after all.

You must know that to-day is the anniversary of the independence of
Chile. The procession got up in honor of it consisted, perhaps, of
twenty men, nearly a third of whom were of that class of Yankees who
are particularly noisy and particularly conspicuous in all celebrations
where it is each man's most onerous duty to get what is technically
called "tight." The man w