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56
sight among poor streets, roads, fields, and woods. Large parts
of its surface have been covered with turf or diversified by
small artificial mounds and slopes; but the turf is now gray
and dead; the yellow sand shows through in many places; and
the square stones, urns, painted iron benches, and unsubstantial
looking tombs that stand in clusters, are tiny. In making the
mounds the trunks of many of the trees were buried almost to
the branches, and these trees look fat, stubby, and short-legged
in the gray mist. A heavy odour of warm, salty grease hangs
in the lower air, a suggestive stench from a factory for reducing
fats somewhere in the neighborhood. There are winding
macadam roads through the cemetery.
When I have waited a little while at a place which has
recently been added for the graves of poor people, the great
black motor coach, splashed with mud, appears suddenly out
of the city and enters one of the large stone gates at the south
eastern corner. There is a stone lodge here, and a bell over
the gates tolls briefly as the coach comes in. Then the vehicle
follows a road parallel to a lonely bare wet red-paved street
outside, in which long dingy trolley cars pass at intervals; and
comes quickly to where I am. The sand here is entirely bare;
the few old forest trees are neglected; and the graves lie in long
close rows. They have no stones, but there are dead rotten
flowers on some of the newest, fluttering dismally from card
board frames wound with lead foil and adorned with letters
of crinkly paper. Some graves have been covered with white
cotton cloth fastened to the ground by pegs; but that is all.
Ragged rotten brown leaves lie in the hollows of the sand,
where brown weeds stand; and wet newspapers are blown about
by the cold wind.
In this shabby somber place on the dun earth of the bound
less lake country, beside the harsh ugly city in which he has
been an unwelcome stranger, but under the great white sky, too,
the body of the servant of God is to be laid.
The coach stops in the muddy road and the escort, all
Negroes except the undertaker and his agile assistant, descend
in the mist. Those who are to carry the coffin gather uncer
tainly, and with the assistance of the undertaker and his man
take it down. Then an irregular procession is formed, the