Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/613

Rh On the morning of the eighth day the priests usually depart, and the family resumes, in some degree, its ordinary occupations. Three times, at the new and the full moon, the married daughters of the deceased each bring a pig's head and a large steamed cake, and join their brothers in worship before the seat of the spirit in their father's house. On the sixth day of the sixth Chinese month, after the removal of the seat of the spirit, the sons buy one cock, one water-melon, cakes, and incense, and offer them to their father's spirit, that being the day on which he, having been judged before ten courts in hades, crosses its narrow bridge and passes into a region decreed to him according to his deserts. The cock wakens him, and is afterward presented by him to the keeper of the bridge; the melon and cakes are distributed on the route, and the incense is burned in ceremonious respect to the deceased. After the first hundred days the dead parent receives offerings of food, with the burning of incense and spirit-money, about ten times a year, including always his birthday and the anniversary of his death

White is, in a general way, the color of mourning. Sons, during the first three days, wear the tunic wrong side out, and on one side of the body only. After that time they wear, like other mourners, garments of unbleached hempen cloth, except on the seventh day, when they and their wives wear sackcloth tunics, usually hired from a shop at which coffins are sold. The sons do not shave their heads for one hundred days, and they wear mourning for twenty-seven months, during which time they can not legally marry. Daughters and daughters-in-law put off mourning at the end of one year, when they resume their golden head-ornaments and don some bit of red.

The burial of the encoffined body is sometimes deferred for many years, awaiting the death of a spouse, or the favorable decision of a geomancer concerning a site for a tomb. As the prosperity of every man's descendants is thought to depend upon his being laid in a spot having such relationship to wind and water as will afford him undisturbed repose, the selection of a place of interment is sometimes difficult, and there are men who make their living by searching out good places for graves.

The grave being prepared, friends are informed of the burial, and they assemble at the appointed time to follow the coffin to the hills. The coffin is covered with a red pall. Two lanterns are tied together with a red cord, and arranged so as to hang one on either side of the coffin; and there may be as many pairs of lanterns as there are married couples among the descendants of the deceased. Small bags, with a red and a green side, are also hung upon the coffin, one for each member of the mourning household. The bags contain linen thread, cotton-rolls, peas, rice, hemp-seed, and coins,