Funerals, if they might be dignified by this name, were not infrequent occurrences in Dalton Street, and why this one should have been looked upon as of sufficient importance to collect a group of onlookers at the gate it is difficult to say.  Perhaps it was because of the seeming interest in it of the higher powers—­for suicide and consequent widows and orphans were not unknown there.  This widow and this orphan were to be miraculously rescued, were to know Dalton Street no more.  The rector of a fashionable church, of all beings, was the agent in the miracle.  Thus the occasion was tinged with awe.  As for Mr. Bentley, his was a familiar figure, and had been remarked in Dalton Street funerals before.

They started, the three mourners, on the long drive to the cemetery, through unfrequented streets lined with mediocre dwellings, interspersed with groceries and saloons—­short cuts known only to hearse drivers:  they traversed, for some distance, that very Wilderness road where Mr. Bentley’s old-fashioned mansion once had stood on its long green slope, framed by ancient trees; the Wilderness road, now paved with hot blocks of granite over which the carriage rattled; spread with car tracks, bordered by heterogeneous buildings of all characters and descriptions, bakeries and breweries, slaughter houses and markets, tumble-down shanties, weedy corner lots and “refreshment-houses” that announced “Lager Beer, Wines and Liquors.”  At last they came to a region which was neither country nor city, where the road-houses were still in evidence, where the glass roofs of greenhouses caught the burning rays of the sun, where yards filled with marble blocks and half-finished tombstones appeared, and then they turned into the gates of Winterbourne.

Like the city itself, there was a fashionable district in Winterbourne:  unlike the city, this district remained stationary.  There was no soot here, and if there had been, the dead would not have minded it.  They passed the Prestons and the Parrs; the lots grew smaller, the tombstones less pretentious; and finally they came to an open grave on a slope where the trees were still young, and where three men of the cemetery force lifted the coffin from the hearse—­Richard Garvin’s pallbearers.

John Hodder might not read the service, but there was none to tell him that the Gospel of John was not written for this man.  He stood an the grass beside the grave, and a breeze from across the great river near by stirred the maple leaves above his head.  “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”  Nor was there any canon to forbid the words of Paul:  “It is sown in corruption; it is raised in in corruption; it is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.”

They laid the flowers on the fresh earth, even the white roses, and then they drove back to the city.