Presently my friend said:

"You remember when we were in the boat yesterday, we saw a man driving
some horses along the bank?"

"Yes."

He nodded at the hearse and said "Well, that's him."

I thought awhile.

"I didn't take any particular notice of him," I said. "He said
something, didn't he?"

"Yes; said it was a fine day. You'd have taken more notice if you'd
known that he was doomed to die in the hour, and that those were the
last words he would say to any man in this world."

"To be sure," said a full voice from the rear. "If ye'd known that, ye'd
have prolonged the conversation."

We plodded on across the railway line and along the hot, dusty road
which ran to the cemetery, some of us talking about the accident, and
lying about the narrow escapes we had had ourselves. Presently someone
said:

"There's the Devil."

I looked up and saw a priest standing in the shade of the tree by the
cemetery gate.

The hearse was drawn up and the tail-boards were opened. The funeral
extinguished its right ear with its hat as four men lifted the coffin
out and laid it over the grave. The priest--a pale, quiet young
fellow--stood under the shade of a sapling which grew at the head of
the grave. He took off his hat, dropped it carelessly on the ground,
and proceeded to business. I noticed that one or two heathens winced
slightly when the holy water was sprinkled on the coffin. The drops
quickly evaporated, and the little round black spots they left were
soon dusted over; but the spots showed, by contrast, the cheapness and
shabbiness of the cloth with which the coffin was covered. It seemed
black before; now it looked a dusky grey.

Just here man's ignorance and vanity made a farce of the funeral. A
big, bull-necked publican, with heavy, blotchy features, and a supremely
ignorant expression, picked up the priest's straw hat and held it
about two inches over the head of his reverence during the whole of the
service. The father, be it remembered, was standing in the shade. A few
shoved their hats on and off uneasily, struggling between their disgust
far the living and their respect for the dead. The hat had a conical
crown and a brim sloping down all round like a sunshade, and the
publican held it with his great red claw spread over the crown. To
do the priest justice, perhaps he didn't notice the incident. A stage
priest or parson in the same position might have said, "Put the hat
down, my friend; is not the memory o