Doctor Prescott, in his broadcloth surtout, with his black satin stock muffling richly his stately neck, sat in the room with the mourners, directly opposite the Edwards family.  His wife was beside him.  She was a handsome woman, taller and larger than her husband, with a face of gentlest serenity set in shining bands of auburn hair.  Mrs. Doctor Prescott looked like an empress among the other women, with her purple velvet pelisse sweeping around her in massive folds, and her purple velvet bonnet with a long ostrich plume curling over the side—­the purple being considered a sort of complimentary half-mourning.  Squire Eben Merritt’s wife, Abigail, could not approach her, although she was finely dressed in black satin, and a grand cashmere shawl from overseas.  Mrs. Eben Merritt was a small and plain-visaged little woman; people had always wondered why Squire Eben Merritt had married her.  Eben Merritt had not come to the funeral.  It was afterwards reported that he had gone fishing instead, and people were scandalized, and indignantly triumphant, because it was what they had expected of him.  Little Lucina had come with her mother, and sat in the high chair where they had placed her, with her little morocco-shod feet dangling, her little hands crossed in her lap, and her blue eyes looking out soberly and anxiously from her best silk hood.  Once in a while she glanced timidly at Jerome, and reflected how he had given her sassafras, and how he hadn’t any father.

When the singing began, the tears came into her eyes and her lip quivered; but she tried not to cry, although there were smothered sobs all around her.  There was that about the sweet, melancholy drone of the funeral hymn which stirred something more than sympathy in the hearts of the listeners.  Imagination of like bereavements for themselves awoke within them, and they wept for their own sorrows in advance.

The minister offered a prayer, in which he made mention of all the members of poor Abel’s family, and even distant relatives.  In fact, Paulina Maria had furnished him with a list, which he had studied furtively during the singing.  “Don’t forget any of ’em, or they won’t like it,” she had charged.  So the minister, Solomon Wells, bespoke the comfort and support of the Lord in this affliction for all the second and third cousins upon his list, who bowed their heads with a sort of mournful importance as they listened.

Solomon Wells was an elderly man, tall, and bending limberly under his age like an old willow, his spare long body in nicely kept broadcloth sitting and rising with wide flaps of black coat-tails, his eyes peering forth mildly through spectacles.  He was a widower of long standing.  His daughter Eliza, who kept his house, sat beside him.  She resembled her father closely, and herself looked like an old person anywhere but beside him.  There the juvenility of comparison was hers.