Every woman makes a black dress, and every man ties a band of black cloth around his white coat sleeve.  When there is a wake, it is noisy enough to be Irish.  Our Eastern friends resemble the Irish also in their love of a fine funeral.  To go to the last resting-place escorted by a band and with all possible ceremony seems to make even death acceptable to them.

Among the very poor this ambition is quite disproportionate to their resources.  The percentage of infant mortality, owing to poor nutrition, is especially high; yet babe after babe whose mother unwittingly starved it to death is given a funeral in which the baby carriage hearse is preceded by a local band, and hired mourners stalk solemnly behind the little coffin in place of the mother, who is, in etiquette, required to remain at home.

In Manila funerals resemble our own, save that the hearse, be it white for a child or black for an adult, is drawn by stately caparisoned horses, at the bridles of which stalk men in eighteenth-century court costumes, which include huge shoe buckles, black silk stockings, and powdered wigs.  The carriages flock behind with little pretence of order, and at a sharper pace than is customary with us.  The populace are, however, most respectful; rich and poor alike remove their hats when the funeral cortege is passing.

In the provinces where there are no hearses, a funeral consists usually of a coffin carried on the shoulders of four men, and followed by a straggling concourse of mourners.  If the corpse be that of a child, it not infrequently lies, gorgeously dressed, upon the blue-and-pink-beribboned cushions of a four-wheeled baby carriage.  New-born babes are buried in tiny coffins covered with pink or blue cambric.

The Filipinos say that when a child dies its pure little soul goes straight to gloria, wherefore it is much to be congratulated on leaving this abode of sorrow for one of unending happiness, and only gay music is used at the funeral.  The local bands play solely by ear, and make the most of whatever music they hear sung or whistled on the streets, with the result that strangely inappropriate selections are used on these occasions.  At the first child’s funeral I ever saw, the band was playing “Hot Time,” and a friend to whom I related this fact, declared that at the first one he ever saw they were playing, “I don’t care if you never come back.”  This sounds too fortuitously happy to be true, but it is quite within the possible.

When I had lived in Capiz a year or two, my washerman, or lavandero, died, and his widow, pointing to a numerous progeny, besought for an advance of five pesos for necessary funeral expenses.  She wanted ten, but I refused to countenance that extravagance.  She did not seem overcome by grief, and her plea of numerous offspring was really valueless, for, if anything, they were all better off than before.  Her lord had been only a sham washerman, collecting the garments for her to wash, delivering them, and pocketing the returns, of which he gave her as small a moiety as would sustain life, and spent the rest on the cockpit.