Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/538

530 to dream of to-morrow. At the appointed hour next day, I was at the stables. The head groom, or proprietor, I know not which, touched his hat to me, but though a little surprised at that, I soon forgot it. Nor did it strike me then, as it afterwards did, that it was strange there was only one mourning-coach and pair to follow the hearse and four. Off I drove to the undertaker’s close by, received my orders, and trotted away, with three or four mutes clinging behind to the hearse and coach, to the place where I was directed to take up the corpse. It was a small house, apparently only just finished, if indeed quite finished, and in a part of London now well built over, but then only just beginning to be attacked with bricks and mortar. I faithfully attended to the instructions given over-night, and in due time, with two or four, I forget which, mutes walking by the side of the hearse, started for the burying-place. That was a small country village some few miles out of town, on a road with which I was not acquainted.

“At first it had been easy work trotting round to the undertaker’s, and then to the door where we took up, but now I began to find that my horses were anything but slow and steady. An uneasy lifting of the hind-quarters of my leaders made me extra careful, and long for the time when, having deposited my burden, I could trot back to town, with the mutes sitting on the hearse, laughing, talking, and smoking, as is, or used to be, the unseemly custom. All went