as wide a contrast as could be imagined to the mutes who are hired to stand at the doors of the house in a ceremonious English funeral.
The corpse was laid on its side, as if asleep, beneath a bower of green branches, of which the husband, with the tears running down his black cheeks, removed a few, that I might look at his poor dead wife. I should not have known that she was dead as, owing to the dark skin, my unpractised eye could not detect the change in the complexion and appearance caused by death.
It is customary amongst the natives to bury the dead in a sitting posture; the nails of the corpse are also burnt off before burial, and the hands tied together, and Binnahan seemed pleased to tell me that with regard to her mother the ceremony of burning the nails had been omitted; both that and the tying of the hands are said to be measures of precaution lest the deceased should work his or her way up again to the world's surface, and alarm the living not only by "walking," but, if a man, by using his spears (which are always buried with him) upon his former friends. As the funeral follows close upon the death, the practice of burning off the nails must at least possess, one would think, the recommendation of deciding any doubt about life being extinct or merely suspended, and a native whom we heard of as having shouldered himself out of the ground, above which he lived for some time afterwards, may possibly have owed his revival to these last offices of his somewhat hasty friends.
I now did my best to make a proper suit of clothes for Binnahan, preparatory to sending her to the Government school, during which interval she was constantly visited
