er, and there were fine hisses of
interrogation. This parlor of the Means house had never been used
since the time of the lawyer's mother. Women had been hard at work
there all day, but still there was over everything a dim, filmy
effect, as of petrified dust and damp. A great pier-glass loomed out
of the gloom of a wall like a sheet of fog, with scarcely a gleam of
gold left in its tarnished frame. The steel engravings over the
mantel-shelf and between the windows showed blue hazes of mildew. The
mahogany and rosewood of the furniture was white in places; there had
been a good fire all day, but all the covers and the carpet steamed
in one's face with cold damp. However, scarcely a woman in Upham but
would have been willing to be a legitimate mourner for the sake of
investigating the mysterious best-room, which had had a certain glory
in the time of the lawyer's mother.

A great wreath of white flowers lay on the coffin. Its breathless
sweetness clung to the nostrils and seemed to fill the whole house.
Now and then a curl of pungent smoke floated from the door-cracks of
the air-tight stove. All the high lights in the room were the silver
of the coffin trimmings and the white wreath.

Solomon Wells had a difficult task. The popular opinion of Colonel
Jack Lamson in Upham was that he had led a hard life, and had
hastened his end by strong drink. He could neither tell the commonly
accepted truth out of respect to the deceased, nor lies out of regard
to morality. However, one favorable point in the character of the
deceased, upon which people were agreed, was his geniality and bluff
heartiness of good-humor. That the minister so enlarged and displayed
to the light of admiration that he almost made of it the aureole of a
saint. He was obliged then to take refuge in the broad field of
generalities, and discourse upon his text of "All flesh is as grass,"
until his hearers might well lose sight of the importance of any
individual flicker of a grass blade to this wind or that, before the
ultimate end of universal hay.

Solomon Wells was not a brilliant man, but he had a fine instinct for
other people's corns and prejudices. Everybody agreed that his
remarks were able; there were no dissenting voices. He concluded with
an apt and solemnly impressive reference to the wheat and the chaff,
the garnering and the casting into furnace, leaving the application
concerning the deceased wholly to his audience. That completed his
succes