Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 1.djvu/351

Rh regard of a great portion of the Christian population, and of many of the principal Mohammedans of the town—Mar Shimoon especially, who had already been an inmate of the same house for several months, loved her as a parent. Her careful attention to his wants, her anxiety to anticipate all his wishes, and her deep-felt sympathy for his misfortunes, had led him to regard her with no common affection. "She is an English saint," he would often say to my sister or to me; "She is mine and not your mother." When he heard of her death his sorrow was profound, and many tears were shed by the liberated captives and refugees, to whom she had been a bountiful benefactress. Mr. Rassam's relatives at once offered one of their family vaults for her interment, and many of the principal Chaldeans gladly acquiesced in the proposal. But the Latin missionaries interposed, and notwithstanding the united entreaties of many friends obstinately refused to allow one whom they deemed a heretic to be buried in a church over which they claimed jurisdiction. The strong feeling of resentment which such opposition created might have been fatal to their assumed power; but this was no time for angry debates. We wished to bury our dead out of our sight, and knew not where to lay her. The Jacobites spontaneously offered a spot in one of their cemeteries close to the grave of Dr. Grant, who had died a few days previously; but we at length availed ourselves of the generous proposal of Khawaja Tooma, Mr. Rassam's dragoman, and a Romanist Syrian, who, in spite of the protestations of the Latin monks, nobly placed his own family vault in the church of the Holy Virgin at our disposal. (May reward him and his dead with life everlasting for this act of Christian charity.) It was my own sad duty to lead the funeral procession; the few resident Europeans and two American missionaries paid the departed this token of respect and followed her bier; then came Mar Shimoon, Kash' Auraha his archdeacon, and six Nestorian priests, two Jacobite Bishops and all their clergy, and an Armenian priest, each chanting their respective processional anthems, as the mournful company proceeded to the church. The concourse of Nestorian refugees, native Christians, and Mohammedans, was immense; and all that human sympathy could do to assuage the grief of the bereaved was manifested towards us on