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claims to the gratitude of the great multitude of mourners, whose grief is only embittered by the pressure of expensive ceremonial, the undertakers of America are thriving, and vying one with another in every extravagance which can be encouraged by their sad profes

sion.

They have a monthly magazine of their own called The Casket, which has already been running for several years, and is illustrated with portraits of the leading undertakers, "The Monarchs of the Road," as they call themselves. This periodical is the advertising medium of all the great funeral establishments, and of the inventors of various methods of embalming. Drugs for this purpose are advertised, for the use of families that incline to domestic experiments, and full directions for use are given, and for all the ghastly processes of thus manipulating the loved remains.

With a happy consciousness that few relations would care to usurp these "professional" functions, the great establishments advertise their readiness, at any moment of day or night, to send out a competent staff to take charge of all details. All that is required is a hint as to the "style" preferred, and the special method by which the body is to be prepared. The Director-General and his assistants will take good care that all is done "in first-rate style."

The "Antiseptic Embalming Fluid" is highly recommended. "It preserves the body without destroying the identity of the features; it removes discoloration, restores the skin to its natural colour, prevents the formation of gases, and acts as a preservative in all kinds of weather, without the use of ice." By a more revolting process, minutely detailed, the body, after being plunged into a bath of salts of alumina, is filled with a liquid, described as "The Egyptian Embalmer, a never-failing preservative."

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As a matter of course, The Casket revels in descriptions of elaborate funerals, giving details as minute as the records of fashion in a Court journal. All the splendours of costly material are enlarged upon, and estimates of the sums which have been expended, which in some cases have been made to mount up to ten thousand dollars <£2,000)!

But it is not only the journal of death which luxuriates in such details. Here is an extract from a New York paper on the last toilette of a lady :—

"Miss R was laid out in white rep silk, elegantly trimmed with white satin and very fine point lace. The skirt was draped with smilax and lilies of the valley. The casket was made to order by the Stein Manufacturing Co., of Rochester, in their celebrated Princess style. It was covered with the most delicate shade of blue silk velvet, with corners and mouldings tufted with white satin. The inside was trimmed with white satin, and with very heavy sewing silk and bullion fringe. The handles were long bars covered with sewing silk.

"The casket opened at full length, the inside of the lid being tufted with

white satin. Miss R looked very natural-more as if asleep than dead. There was a splendid display of flowers, sent as tokens of sympathy from her many friends. All the stands containing the flowers were covered with white, giving a general appearance of purity."

Nor is such care bestowed only on the young and beautiful. Grave citizens, whose influence on their fellows has been due to far different qualities, are now consigned to the hands of "artists" who relieve the ghastly pallor of death by a judicious application of rouge, and the dead man, in full evening dress, with costly studs on snowy shirt front, white gloves, and a necktie that Beau Brummell might have envied, lies in State to receive the last ceremonial visit of all his friends and acquaintances.

In further illustration of a subject, happily so strange to English ears, I think the following passage, from the San Francisco Sunday Times, is sufficiently curious to be worth preserving :—

"Funerals are very troublesome affairs," said the head of a leading undertaking establishment to a New York Mercury reporter who accosted him on the subject, "for the reason that the mourners are never on hand, and you are always kept an hour behind time. The only time we have things as we wish is when we are notified to come and take charge of the remains. Then we have all to say, and can proceed with our work without delay." "How do you prepare remains generally?"

"We first ascertain when the body is to be buried, then place it on ice, and secure the order for the coffin or casket. Then, on the morning or afternoon previous to the funeral, we go to the house, and place the body in the casket, after first nicely dressing it, and combing the hair, and making all as favourable to the eye as possible."

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Suppose the person had died a violent death, or in some way the features became repulsive to the eye, what would you do?"

"In that case, we would resort to the art, or, I might say, the secrets of our profession. For instance, if the mouth could not be closed, we would sew the lips together on the inside, or else secure them to the teeth with thread. I can tell you of any number of curious cases I have had. Only a few weeks ago, the sister of a well-known lady, who had died a maiden, came to me, and said: 'I have come myself to give you the order for my sister's funeral, because there are some arrangements to be carried through, which she requested me to have strictly followed. I want you to engage an artist to come to the house. She died from the effects of consumption, and is very pale. Her face must be made to look as natural as possible. Her lips are blue; I want them made red. Her suit to wear in the casket is now being finished by the dressmaker, and your female attendant must be careful about putting on the dress, because it is made to fit her, as if she was in full life.'

"Well, I went to the house, on Fifth Avenue, the next day; my artist began his work, and when he was through, my woman attendant carefully dressed and laid out the body in the casket. When the artist and myself entered the parlour, and looked at the remains, it was wonderful! The dress of the woman was fit to be worn by a princess as a bridal suit. She was adorned with jewellery, and upon her head was a wreath of lilies, while her hands were encased in white kid gloves. Her age was forty-three years; she only looked eighteen! Her outfit was composed of fine corded white silk, trimmed with Valenciennes lace, and looped up at the sides."

After revealing various other family secrets, the reporter gives some ghastly details of embalming, as occasionally practised in the

States. He then goes on to quote some remarks of another wellknown undertaker :--

"I handle corpses of every kind, from those of wealthy gentlemen to those taken from the Morgue, and saved from paupers' graves. I don't do much embalming; but I have the most curious orders for furnishing some funerals. Only a few days ago, I received an order to furnish a shroud of pure white satin, scolloped round the bottom, and with silk rosettes up the centre to the neck front, which was to be turned back so that the breast could be seen uncovered nearly to the waist. This was for a young woman about eighteen years of age, who died after a short illness. She had not fallen away much, and still preserved unmistakable signs of having been a beautiful-looking girl while in life.

"Her husband, an old Southerner, stood near her casket, and I saw him touch her face with his handkerchief. When I approached the remains, I at once noticed that her eyelashes and eyebrows had been pencilled, and her cheeks and lips painted. The poor old fellow was wild at losing his young bride. I thought at first she was his daughter, but at the hotel I was soon informed that she was his second wife.'

"How do you find business now in comparison with that of former years?' "People are not so lavish about flowers, but a great deal of "style" is wanted about the corpse. Some few years back a body was seldom robed in anything but a shroud. To-day, shrouds are hardly used except by Catholics and Hebrews. Gentlemen, as a rule, are laid out in a full suit of black cloth, a white shirt and black necktie, the hair and moustache or whiskers being arranged to suit. I have known of instances where a dentist has been ordered to place a set of false teeth, with a twenty dollar gold plate, in the mouth of a dead woman, to save her looks.'

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"Is the parting scene as affecting as formerly?'

"No; that has changed for the better. People are becoming toned down. Old-time screeching and crying are dying out.'"

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This is the unpoctical side of the picture, as seen from a professional point of view!

Extremes in all fashions generally lead to a reaction, and it would appear that funerals are no exception to this rule, for I am told that the leaders of society in New York now affect extreme simplicity, and have declared in favour of pure white shrouds and unadorned coffins.

Moreover, to so great an excess had the custom of sending flowers to the house of the dead been carried, that the announcement of a death is now frequently accompanied by a request that friends will send no flowers. The multitude of these ceremonial offerings had become embarrassing, and extra carriages were required to convey them to the grave. Thus, the funeral car of Mr. Stewart, the famous millionaire, was followed by six carriages filled with floral offerings. A few days later, the poor corpse thus honoured was stolen from its grave, and has never been recovered.

How much less temptation would have been offered to the sacrilegious thieves, had that vault contained only a handful of calcined ashes!

C. F. GORDON CUMMING.

WANTED, AN ELISHA.

"ENGLA

men."

NGLAND," wrote Lord Beaconsfield, in one of the most characteristic of his novels, "must be saved by her young One does not quite know what is meant by it, nor whether he meant anything at all. The remark has that frequent peculiarity of its author's more sententious utterances, that, though its pregnancy seems palpable, it disappoints the efforts of the critical accoucheur. But however indefinite as a proposition, there is no doubt about its import as a sentiment. It is only one of many expressions of Lord Beaconsfield's unbounded, and, as it turned out, abiding sympathy with the aspirations and the efforts, the enthusiasms and the energies-with, in short, the whole moral and intellectual nisus of youth. That in his own case he too often mistook aspirations for inspirations, there can, at this time of day, I imagine, be no question; and he has certainly left behind him critical estimates, apparently serious, of his contemporaries in which he has fallen into the same generous error. But it is to the credit of his heart at any rate, that his faith in youth as a force survived the inevitable discovery of its insufficiency as a guide, and that this faith remained a green oasis in the desert of his cynicism to the last. Si la jeunesse savait, si la vieillesse pouvait, was a lament of which the latter clause impressed him always more than the former. The wisdom of old age always appeared to him rather dearly bought by the loss of the power of youth; and if it be not given to man to combine them, one imagines that of the two he would have declared for the power, and taken his chance of the wisdom. Nothing, at all events, is more certain than that throughout his life he took a special interest in the fortunes, a peculiar pleasure in watching the ways, of the young; and one cannot help wishing that it might be possible for him, in some other phase

of being, to observe, with the half-amusement, half-admiration, which it would have aroused in him in lifetime, the dashing attack just delivered by the member for Woodstock against the chiefs of his party. Not of course that Lord Randolph Churchill is, in any sense. of the word, so juvenile as it suits some of his opponents to pretend. A politician of thirty-four, who has been nine years in Parliament, has neither the advantage nor the disadvantage of extreme youth— neither its powerful hold upon the sympathies, nor its unauthoritative appeal to the judgment. His years are respectable, and there are no conspicuous marks of immaturity about either his oratory, his manner, or his mind. Still he is young in what we may call the conventional Parliamentary sense of the word-that is to say, he is under forty, and has never held one of those subordinate Ministerial offices which are assumed by courtesy in this country to add a dozen years to the age. His revolt from the rule of the "Junta," as he calls them, has therefore an air of far greater audacity to the English eye than would have belonged to any similar movement on the part even of the youngest and least important of the occupants of the front Opposition bench. The public insist on regarding it as the sally of a clever but presumptuous youth; and the mere fact that this is the general view of it may well be supposed to make it interesting to the shade of Lord Beaconsfield.

One thing however is, I think, certain, that that shrewd critic and experienced professor of Parliamentary fence would have been far less shocked at the presumption of the performance, than many of its actual observers. Those indeed who are excessively scandalized at it are probably unaware of the peculiar position occupied by Lord Randolph Churchill in the House of Commons. It is only fair to him to admit that a right appreciation of this point would probably modify many of the more severe judgments which have been passed upon him. Lord Randolph Churchill is one of the few, and one of the best of the few debaters, in the strict sense of the word, in the House of Commons; he shines in the art of debate in a sense in which the official chiefs of his party are rather sadly to seek. They, of course, are all more or less effective speakers upon set occasions: with their official experience they could not well be otherwise. Outside their ranks, too, there are no doubt many Conservative members who can speak fairly well on great political questions, with a sufficient time allowed them to think over the subject, and who, as they are wise enough not to address the House as a rule without this preparation, are listened to with respect. But that is not But that is not "debating" of the kind in which Mr. Disraeli excelled, and in which Lord Randolph Churchill is justly conscious of proficiency. The ability to make half a dozen impromptu speeches in the course of an evening, upon an equal number of previously unconsidered subjects, and to talk sensibly, vigorously,

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