remnants of the family who had no wealth to carry them smoothly along the stream of life. Old Mrs. Featherstone (who did washing) was there sobbing because she sobbed at all funerals, and old Miss Haddon, the genteel Pentland cousin, dressed even in the midst of summer in her inevitable cape of thick black broadcloth, and Mrs. Malson, shabby-genteel in her foulards and high-pitched bonnet, and Miss Murgatroyd whose bullfinch house was now "Ye Witch's Broome" where one got bad tea and melancholy sandwiches. . . .
Together Bishop Smallwood and Aunt Cassie had planned a service calculated skilfully to harrow the feelings and give full scope to the vast emotional capacities of their generation and background.
They chose the most emotional of hymns, and Bishop Smallwood, renowned for his effect upon pious and sentimental old ladies, said a few insincere and pompous words which threw Aunt Cassie and poor old Mrs. Featherstone into fresh excesses of grief. The services for the boy became a barbaric rite dedicated not to his brief and pathetic existence but to a glorification of the name he bore and of all those traits—the narrowness, the snobbery, the lower middle-class respect for property—which had culminated in the lingering tragedy of his sickly life. In their respective pews Anson and Aunt Cassie swelled with pride at the mention of the Pentland ancestry. Even the sight of the vigorous, practical, stocky Polish women staring round-eyed at the funeral procession a little before, returned to them now in a wave of pride and secret elation. The same emotion in some way filtered back through the little church from the pulpit where Bishop Smallwood (with the sob in his voice which had won him prizes at the seminary) stood surrounded by midsummer flowers, through all the relatives and connections, until far in the back among the more obscure and remote ones it became simply a pride in their relation to New England and the ancient dying village that
