re, in country papers, none ever dies. It may be because,
as it is said, the country is nearer to God than the town. But so it
is that there, in country papers, in the fulness of time, or by the
fell clutch of chance, one "enters into his final rest," or "passes
from his earth life," or one "on Wed. last peacefully accepted the
summons to Eternity," or "on Thurs." (it may be) "passed to his eternal
reward." "Died" is indeed a hard word. It has never found admittance
to hearts that love and esteem. Whitman (was it not?) when he heard
that Carlyle was dead went out in the night and looked up at the stars
and said that he did not believe it. Even so, are not all who take
their passing "highly esteemed" in country papers? In small places,
doubtless, death wears for the community a more tragic mein than in
cities, where it is more frequent and where we knew not him that lies
on his bier next door but one away. In the country places this man who
is now no longer upright and quick was a neighbour to all. And the
provincial writer of obituaries follows a high authority, another
rustic poet, deathless and known throughout the world, who sang of his
Hoosier friend "he is not dead but just away."

When one enters upon his last role in this world, which all fill in
their turn, he becomes in rural journals that personage known
throughout the countryside as "the deceased." It might be argued that,
alas! the only thing you can do with one deceased is to bury him. It
might be held that you cannot educate him. That he, the deceased,
cannot enter upon the first steps of his career as a bookkeeper. That
he cannot marry the daughter of the Governor of the State. That
whatever happened to him, whatever he accomplished, enjoyed, endured,
in his pilgrimage through this world he experienced before he became,
as it is said, deceased. That, in short, he is now dead. And that it
should be said of him, as we say in the Metropolitan press, as a young
man Mr. Doe did this and later that. But in places simpler, and so
more eloquent, than the Metropolis the final fact of one's existence
colours all the former things of his career. In country obituaries all
that has been done was done by the deceased. In this association of
ideas between the prime and the close of life is to be felt a sentiment
which knits together each scene. This Mr. Some One did not merely
apprentice himself to a printer at fourteen (as city papers say it) and
ma