Are we not, in this class of our tastes and feelings, becoming rapidly Egyptianized?  Why, I expect in a year or two to see coffins introduced into the parlors of the Fifth Avenue, and to find them, when their owners fail or absquatulate, advertised for sale at auction, with the rest of the household furniture, at a great sacrifice on the original cost.

“—­> ONE SUPERB COFFIN OF ELEGANT PATTERN AND SUPERIOR WORKMANSHIP, AS GOOD AS NEW.  TWO DITTO, SLIGHTLY DAMAGED.”

And then the fashion will become popular with the less aristocratic portion of the community, and you will see crowds of servant-girls and street-loungers around the windows of our magnificent coffin-bazaars, and hear from them such exclamations as these:  “Oh! do look here, Matilda!  Wouldn’t you like to have such a nice coffin as that?” or, “What a dear, sweet sarcophagus that one is there!” or, “Faith, I should like to own that air-tight!”

* * * * *

But the day is now far advanced.  The funeral processions have ceased to arrive, and the husbandmen, having sown the immortal seed furnished by the metropolis, with shovels and empty dinner-pails, are on their way, whistling and talking in groups, homeward.  The number of loungers and sight-seers is rapidly diminishing as the light in the more thickly shaded walks becomes dim, and the clock at the gateway indicates the near approach of the hour when the portals will be closed.

—­Alone with the dead!  Alone in the night among tombs and graves!  How many readers do not at the sight of these words feel an involuntary soupcon of a shudder?  Would not the cause of this indefinable secret dread of the darkness which covers a graveyard be a curious matter of inquiry?  Let one ever so cultivated and skeptical, familiar as a physician or a soldier with the spectacle of death, ever so full of mental and physical courage, passing alone late at night through a graveyard, hear the least sound among the graves, or see a moving object of any kind, especially a white one, and he will instantly feel an alloverishness foreign to ordinary experience, and I will not answer for him that his hair does not stand on end and his flesh grow rough as a nutmeg-grater.  A company of three or four persons would feel far less disturbed.  This proves the emotion to be genuine fear.  And with this recognized as a fact, ask the question, Of what are you afraid?  What makes your feet stick to the ground so fast, or inspires you to take to your legs and run for your life?  “A ridiculous, foolish superstition,” reason answers.

I do not intend by this to intimate that you, reader, bold and courageous person that I know you to be, would not dare to go through a graveyard at night.  By no means.  I only predicate the existence within you of this ridiculous, foolish superstition, and maintain that you would do so under all circumstances with peculiar feelings which you did not possess before you entered it and which you will not possess as soon as you have left it, and under certain circumstances with a trembling of the nerves and a palpitation of the heart, and that the occasion might occur when you would be still more strongly and strangely affected.  To illustrate the latter case I have an anecdote a-propos.