“O, Josiah,” she sobbed, “who’d have thought it!  The best, the kindest husband a woman ever had.  O! how sorry I am for every hard word I ever spoke to you.  And you so good—­never to find fault when I scolded.  I was wicked—­and yet all the time I loved you so.  Did you know it, Josiah?  If you were back again, how different I would treat you!  The fire should always be burning bright, and the hearth clean, when you came back cold from fishing, and you should never, never ask me a second time for anything.  But you don’t hear me.  What’s the use of crying and lamenting?  Here,” she said, raising herself up, and addressing those next her, “take him, and put him in his grave.”

She staggered and fainted, and would have fallen, had she not been caught in the arms of sympathizing friends, who removed her into the adjoining chamber, and applied the usual restoratives.  This caused some little delay, but, after a time, the person who had assumed upon himself the arrangements of the funeral, entered, preceding the four bearers, whose hats he took into his own hands, to restore them to the owners when the coffin should be placed in the hearse—­a plain black wagon, with black cloth curtains—­waiting at the door.  The coffin was taken up by them, and deposited accordingly; after which, they took their places in front of the hearse, while the four pall-bearers ranged themselves on each side.  At a signal from the director of the ceremony, the whole moved forward, leaving space for the carriages to approach the door.  Mr. Armstrong’s carriage was driven up, and the widow and children, with two or three females, were assisted in.  Then followed a few other vehicles, with the nearest relatives, after whom came others, as they pleased to join.  A large number of persons had previously formed themselves into a procession before the hearse, headed by the minister, who would have been accompanied by a physician, had one assisted in making poor Sill’s passage to the other world easier.

The mournful cortege wound slowly up a hill to the burying-ground—­a piece of broken land on the top.  At the time of which we write, the resting-place of the departed of Hillsdale presented a different appearance from what it does now.  Wild, neglected, overgrown with briers, it looked repulsive to the living, and unworthy of the dead.  The tender sentiment which associates beauty with the memory of our friends, and loves to plant the evergreen and rose around their graves, seemed then not to have touched the bosoms of our people.  A pleasing change has succeeded.  The briars have been removed, trees planted, and when necessary to be laid out, new burial-ground spots have been selected remarkable for attractiveness and susceptibility of improvement.  The brook has been led in and conducted in tortuous paths, as if to lull with a soft hymn the tired sleepers, and then expanded into a fairy lake, around which the weeping willow lets fall its graceful pendants.