. The land of heather . The funeral was that of an old man who had diedtwo days before, and this afternoon the men of theplace put on their Sabbath blacks * and gatheredabout the door of the old mans dwelHng. Not manyof them went inside, for the house was small and wouldaccommodate few besides the relatives. It stood onthe lane that led up to the inn on the back row, and asombre hearse waited at the corner. When the shorthouse service was concluded, the men mourners pre-pared to walk to the grave. The hearse headed theprocession, and next came the clergyman in his shovelhat, closely followed b
. The land of heather . The funeral was that of an old man who had diedtwo days before, and this afternoon the men of theplace put on their Sabbath blacks * and gatheredabout the door of the old mans dwelHng. Not manyof them went inside, for the house was small and wouldaccommodate few besides the relatives. It stood onthe lane that led up to the inn on the back row, and asombre hearse waited at the corner. When the shorthouse service was concluded, the men mourners pre-pared to walk to the grave. The hearse headed theprocession, and next came the clergyman in his shovelhat, closely followed by the rest of the company. Theweather was so wet that every one carried umbrellasand wore waterproofs or overcoats, and thus the strag-gling group wended its way down the road towardthe burying-ground, a good mile distant. The bee expert of the village, known as The AuldLad, had stepped in at the shoemakers to see theprocession pass, and I said to him it seemed too badthe funeral should come on so stormy a day; but he. A>V^^in V^^> ?^? Gypsies Village Happenings . ^;^ thought it a good omen, and said it was an old sayingin Scotland,— <* Happy is the bride that the sun shines is the corp that the rain poors on. In the Auld Kirk churchyard, which was the placeof interment for all the hamlet, stood a substantialstone shed that had been pointed out to me as the Deid Hoose. It occurred to me now to ask theAuld Lad about this building. In response he toldhow, when he was a schoolboy, the students frae themedical colleges used to be hftin the deid when theywere first buried. For a long time the people all over Scotlandwatched each newly made grave every night duringseveral weeks. The watchers kept their vigils in twosfor the sake of company, and they always carried aload gun with them, and, what was lessconsequence, a bottle of whiskey to alleviate the cheer-lessness of their occupation. They usually stayed inthe church or a near house, looking out freq
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Keywords: ., bookauthorjohnsonc, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookyear1904
