Edwin scrutinized the coffin, and the wreaths, and the cards inscribed with mournful ecstatic affection that nestled amid the flowers, and the faces of the audience, and his thought was: 'This will soon be over now!

The cortege moved. Rain was threatening, and the streets were muddy.

At the cemetery it was raining, and the walkers made a string of glistening umbrellas; only the paid mutes had no umbrellas....

Vehicles, by some municipal caprice, were forbidden to enter the cemetery. And in the rain, between the stone-perpetuated great names of the town's history -the Boultons, the Lawtons, the Blackshaws, the Beardmores, the Dunns, the Longsons, the Hulmes, the Suttons, the Greenes, the Gardiners, the Calverts, the Dawsons, the Brindleys, the Bainses, and the Woods - the long procession proceeded by Auntie Hamps tramped for over a third of a mile along the asphalted path winding past the chapel to the graveside. And all the way Mr Breeze, between Edwin and Albert, with Bert a yard to the rear, talked about boils, and Edwin said Yes and No, and Albert said nothing. And at the graveside the three ministers removed their flat round hats and put on skull-caps, while skilfully holding their umbrellas aloft.

And while Mr Flowerdew was reading from a little book in the midst of the large, encircling bare-headed crowd with umbrellas, and the gravedigger with absolute precision accompanied his words with three castings of earth into the hollow of the grave, Edwin scanned an adjoining tombstone, which marked the family vault of Isaac Plant, a renowned citizen. ....

.......And even in that hilly and bleak burial-ground, with melancholy sepulchral parties and white wind-blown surplices dotted about the sodden slopes, and the stiff antipathetic multitude around the pit which held Auntie Hamps, and the terrible seared, harsh, grey-brown industrial landscape of the great smoking amphitheatre below, Edwin felt happy in the sensation of being alive and of having to contend with circumstance."