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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



in at leisure beforehand. If this be the case, 

 there must be an odd conflict of feelings at times 

 in the minds of expecting and provident mourn- 

 ers — on the one hand, the wish that the beloved 

 relative should recover ; on the other, the sense 

 that, if he really cannot recover, it will be very 

 awkward if he survives long enough for the mourn- 

 ing dresses to get out of fashion before they can 

 appropriately be taken into wear; and, if a mod- 

 est black serge, or some such not too anguishful 

 stuff for double duty, should get taken into wear 

 before the bereavement, it must require consider- 

 able extra resignation to have at once to watch it 

 growing shabby and the sufferer sinking. 



All women say that mourning is very expen- 

 sive. Men, in their ignorance, aware that their 

 female relations often wear some sort of black 

 garment and call it economical, suppose that 

 black, under the name of mourning, may easily be 

 a cheap and serviceable costume, if willful or 

 weak extravagance has nothing to say to its cost. 

 If any man wants to comprehend whether and 

 why there is a difference financially between a 

 liberal use of black in ordinary attire and the pur- 

 chase and keeping up of a head-to-heel black out- 

 fit in mourning materials, let him consult any 

 woman capable of keeping accounts who has ever 

 arrayed herself in orthodox garb of grief. But, 

 supposing that women's mourning were not in it- 

 self more expensive than any ordinary dress of or- 

 dinary women, that even it were less expensive, 

 and that all mourning in a household — the men's, 

 the children's, the servants, too— were less ex- 

 pensive than the usual colored clothing, what is it 

 when all at once everybody in the household must 

 have a new outfit, regardless of the condition of 

 the present wardrobe ? Without speaking of the 

 homes in which actual poverty prevails, there are 

 but a minority of homes in which the death of the 

 husband and father does not make an immediate 

 fall of income ; in many cases the fall is from ease 

 to penury. Perhaps the house has to be given up, 

 the sons must be put to cheaper schools, and bred 

 to humbler professions, the grown-up daughters 

 must go out as governesses and companions, the 

 younger ones must do without education, and 

 thrive as Ihey may on stinted meals — but, out of 

 the scanty funds, mourning outfits must be pur- 

 chased ; every consideration must give way to 

 that. And, if the widow and children should say : 

 " We are too poor ; we should have to get into 

 debt for these things, or to make sacrifices which 

 it is wrong to make; we will wear our old clothes, 

 and we will try to do honor to our dead by our 

 lives of duty," they would bid fair to incur a scan- 



dal which would forfeit them every help, and 

 perhaps fatally damage their prospects of self- 

 maintenance. Those who can least afford the 

 mourning are oftenest those who can least afford 

 to dispense with it. There might be a more char- 

 itable result from some of the well-known wealthy 

 and fashionable women of the West-end defying 

 impertinent comments, and, for the sake of less 

 prosperous and weaker sisters, abjuring all mourn- 

 ing but such as, like low dresses in winter noon- 

 days and other barbarous usages, is compulsory 

 at court, than from untold guineas in almsgiving. 



Where the grief represented by mourning is 

 deep and real, mourning is frequently a peculiarly 

 cruel infliction. It is an unceasing reminder, not 

 of the loved one, but of the loss. If we love our 

 dead we want to remember them as they were 

 with us, we want still to keep up in our minds 

 the associations that made them, even in absence, 

 a part of our lives. There should be something 

 of pleasure still in thinking of them, or what 

 honor or graciousness is there in our memory of 

 them at all ? But we have to clothe ourselves in 

 a symbolism which symbolizes nothing but the 

 undertaker ; we may not put on so much as a 

 glove or a necktie but it is to speak of the funeral 

 gloom. It is thus that the dead get forgotten : 

 from the day they depart we force their deaths, 

 not their lives, on our minds, and the thought is 

 too painful and we are glad when we can turn 

 from it. It is a memory to put by with the black 

 clothes ; and it kills the brighter one that surely 

 is the one we should all wish to be mourned by. 



For such persons as have been spoken of 

 above, those thrown on their own resources by a 

 death, the perpetuation of not the sorrow only, 

 but the gloom and horror of the event, is particu- 

 larly an evil. They need all their energies for 

 their unwonted struggle with the world, and they 

 have to learn a necessary cheerfulness ; to brood 

 on their loss is to be enervated, and they must 

 put by even wholesome sorrow for convenient 

 seasons. To women of impressionable tempera- 

 ment, to those especially with the artistic suscep- 

 tibility to the influences of color and light — a 

 susceptibility which belongs to very many women 

 who have no artistic genius, belongs perhaps to 

 the majority of women — the lugubrious surround- 

 ing of their own clothes is an aggravation of 

 mental pain which they should be forbidden for 

 health and sanity's sake ; and to any woman who 

 needs the power of fixing her attention on other 

 things than her misfortunes the reminder forever 

 in her sight is a practical mischief. Men's mourn- 

 ing, if not more reasonable, is less hurtful, be- 



