Note 28 — Chapter VIII · THE VILLAGE INN.

In Wales the attenders of a country funeral adjourn, as regularly as they attend the funeral itself, to the alehouse; and it strikes an Englishman very strangely, to meet a funeral going to the church, and to hear the chief mourner, perhaps the widow, crying aloud, and repeating as she goes, all the virtues of the deceased; and in an hour after, to find the whole company seated in the public house, enveloped in a canopy of tobacco-smoke, loud in talk, and drowning their sorrow in their cups. I recollect how my feelings were harrowed by meeting such a funeral, and a widow just so lamenting; but the gentleman with me, a resident of the place, said “O, it is all the better—they run off the poignancy of their feelings by their lamentations. Their grief seems like one of their mountain torrents—loud and rapid, and then it is gone.”