The stable-boy answers that the little blacks are
at "the funeral." And after he has gone off to ask his employer what is
in then, the employer, who in his unofficial moments is our neighbour,
our church choir bass, our landlord even, comes and tells us that, after
all, we may have the little blacks, and he himself brings them round at
once,--the same little blacks that we meant all along. And when, quite
naturally, we wonder at the boy's version, we learn: "Oh, why, the
blacks was standin' just acrost the street, waitin' at the church door,
hitched to the hearse. I took 'em out an' put in the bays. I says to
myself: 'The corp won't care.'" Someway the Proudfits' car and the
stable telephone must themselves have slipped from modernity to old
fashion before that incident shall quite come into its own.

So it is with certain of our domestic ways. For example, Mis' Postmaster
Sykes--in Friendship Village every woman assumes for given name the
employment of her husband--has some fine modern china and much solid
silver in extremely good taste, so much, indeed, that she is wont to
confess to having cleaned forty, or sixty, or seventy-five
pieces--"seventy-five pieces of solid silver have I cleaned this
morning. You can say what you want to, nice things are a _rill_ care."
Yet--surely this is the proper conjunction--Mis' Sykes is currently
reported to rise in the night preceding the days of her house cleaning,
and to take her carpets out in the back yard, and there softly to sweep
and sweep them so that, at their official cleaning next day, the
neighbours may witness how little dirt is whipped out on the line. Ought
she not to have old-fashioned silver and egg-shell china and drop-leaf
mahogany to fit the practice? Instead of daisy and wild-rose patterns in
"solid," and art curtains, and mission chairs, and a white-enamelled
refrigerator, and a gas range.

We have the latest funeral equipment,--black broadcloth-covered
supports, a coffin carriage for up-and-down the aisles, natural palms to
order, and the pulleys to "let them down slow"; and yet our individual
funeral capacity has been such that we can tell what every woman who has
died in Friendship for years has "done without": Mis' Grocer Stew, her
of all folks, had done without new-style flat-irons; Mis' Worth had used
the bread pan to wash dishes in; Mis' Jeweller Sprague--the _first_ Mis'
Sprague--had had only six bread and butter knives, her that could get
wholesale to