238 DECENTLY AND IN OKDER, 



report upon this animal, a fine adult male, as well as 

 upon another, a young male subsequently secured, and 

 both are pronounced to be indistinguishable from pure 

 Felis catus. These skins are now safely lodged in the 

 Museum at South Kensington. 



LV 



On a wet September afternoon lately, it was my lot 

 to attend a funeral in a remote part of the 

 and in west of Scotland. Most of us, I think, must 

 feel that in the ceremony of sepulture we 

 have reached less near perfection than in any other 

 social rite. It is associated in memory with a fussy 

 undertaker with rusty mutes like waiters suddenly 

 turned out of a third-class restaurant into open day 

 with a hideous hearse, tawdry in everything but colour 

 and with a crowd clad in the ugliest garments that 

 centuries of civilisation have evolved from the primeval 

 fig-leaves. It may be thought that a Scottish funeral 

 is even less satisfactory than others. Suffering as 

 much as an English one from the barbarities of the 

 undertaker's craft, it is also stripped of the solemnity 

 of ancient ritual; earth is committed to earth in a 

 silence that would seem heartless had it not a peculiar 

 pathos of its own. Once upon a time the Church of 

 Scotland was shaken to its foundations by violent 

 disputes about the right way of shaving priests from 

 ear to ear over the pate, as Columba prescribed, or in 

 a patch on the crown only, as was the practice of Rome, 



