“Mauve, sir, is very appropriate for the lighter sorrows.”
“But absolute red,” I retorted, pointing to some velvet of that colour,—
“Is quite admissible when you mourn the departure of a distant relative; but may I show you some gloves?” and suiting the action to the word, she lifted the cover from the glove box, and displayed a perfect picture of delicate half-tones, indicative of a struggle between the cheerful and the sad.
“There is a pleasing melancholy in the shade of grey,” she said, indenting slightly each outer knuckle with the elastic kid, as she measured my hand.
“Can you find a lavender?”
“O yes; the sorrow-tint is very slight in that, and it wears admirably.”
Thus, by degrees, growing beautifully less, the grief of the establishment died out in the tenderest lavender, and I left, profoundly impressed with the charming improvements which Parisian taste has made on the old aboriginal style of mourning.
But my task was not yet accomplished. A part of my commission was to select a neat and appropriate monument, the selection of which was left entirely to my own discretion. Accordingly I wended my way towards the New Hoad, the emporium of “monumental marble.” Here every house has its marketable cemetery, and you see grief in the rough, and ascending to the most delicately chiselled smoothness. Your marble mason is a very different stamp of man from the maison de deuil assistant, and my entrance into the establishment I sought, was greeted with a certain rough respect by the man in attendance, who was chiselling an angel’s classic nose.
“Will you kindly allow me to see some designs for a monument?” I inquired.
“Certainly, sir. Is it for a brother or sister, father or mother, sir?”
“A gentleman,” I replied, rather shortly.
“I hope no offence, sir—but the father of a family?” I nodded assent. “Then will you please to step this way,” he replied; and leading the way through the house, he opened a door, and we entered a back yard filled with broken, but erect, marble columns, that would not have disgraced Palmyra.
“That,” said he, “will be a very suitable article.”
“But,” said I, “do you really break these pillars purposely?”
“Why, that all depends, you see, sir. When the father of a family is called away on a sudden, we break the column off short with a rough fracture: if it has been a lingering case, we chisel it down a little dumpy. That, for instance,” said he, pointing to a very thick pillar, fractured os sharp and ragged as a piece of granite, “is for an awful sudden affliction—a case of apoplexy—a wife and seven small children.”
“But,” I observe, “there are some tall and some short columns.”
“Well, you see,” said he, “that’s all according to age. We break ’em off short for old ’uns, and it stands to reason, when it’s a youngish one, we I give him more shaft.”
“The candle of life is blown out early in some cases; in others, it is burnt to the socket,” I suggested.
“Exactly, sir,” he said, “now you have hit it.”
“Nevertheless,” I replied, “I have not exactly made up my mind about the column. Can you show me any other designs?”
“Yes, certainly, sir,” with that he led the way again to the office, and placed before me a large book of “patterns.” “We do a great deal in that way,” he said, displaying a design with which my reader is probably familiar. It was an urn, after the old tea-urn pattern, half enveloped in a tablecloth overshadowed by a weeping-willow and an exceedingly limp-looking lady, who leaned her forehead against the urn, evidently suffering from a sick head-ache.
“No,” I said, “I think I have seen that design before.”
“Perhaps so,” he replied; “but really there are so many persons die that we can’t have something new every time.”
“What is this?” I inquired. It was an hour-glass and a skull overgrown by a bramble.
“Oh, that is for the country-trade,” he said, hastily turning over the leaf; “we don’t do anything in that way among genteel people. This is the snapped lily-pattern, but that won’t do for the father of a family, and here is the dove-design, a pretty thing enough. We do a good many of them among the evangelicals of Clapham.”
A rather plump-looking bird, making a book-marker of his beak, was directing attention to a passage in an open volume.
“But,” said I, “have you no ornamental crosses?”
“No,” said he, “you must go to Paddington for them sort of things. Lord bless your soul, we should ruin our trade if we was to deal with such Puseyite things.”
“I never knew before,” said I, “that sectarianism thus pursued us even to our tombstones.”
The art of design, it is quite clear, had not yet penetrated to the workshop of the marble-mason, so I was content to select some simple little design, and leave my friend to a resumption of the elaboration of the angel’s nose, in which occupation I had disturbed him.
A TRUE TALE OF A CAT.
Instinct—what is it? and in what and where does it differ from reason? It is the fashion to speak of it as a faculty distinct from the reasoning power of man, upon the assumption that reflection and consideration are qualities of the mind only appertaining to the cooking animals of our globe, and that reason cannot exist without them. Is it not possible that the curious and beautiful links which connect the animal and vegetable kingdoms may have a corresponding continuity in the subtle essence connected with life, and that the distinction, where the line is drawn, is but the introduc-
