XV. THE FASTEST FUNERAL ON RECORD.[10]

XV. THE FASTEST FUNERAL ON RECORD.^[10]

I had just crossed the long bridge leading from Boston to Cambridgeport, and was plodding my dusty way on foot through that not very agreeable suburb, on a sultry afternoon in July, with a very creditable thunder-cloud coming up in my rear, when a stout elderly gentleman, with a mulberry face, a brown coat, and pepper-and-salt smalls, reined up his nag, and after learning that I was bound for Old Cambridge, politely invited me to take a seat beside him in the little sort of tax-cart he was driving. Nothing loth, I consented, and we were soon en route. The mare he drove was a very peculiar animal. She had few good points to the eye, being heavy-bodied, hammer-headed, thin in the shoulders, bald-faced, and rejoicing in a little stump of a tail which was almost entirely innocent of hair. But there were “lots of muscle,” as Major Longbow says, in her hind quarters.

“She aint no Wenus, Sir,” said my new acquaintance, pointing with his whip to the object of my scrutiny—“but handsome is as handsome does. Them’s my sentiments. She’s a rum ’un to look at, but a good ’un to go.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes, Sir! That there mare, Sir, has made good time—I may say, very good time before the hearse.”

“Before the hearse?”

“Before the hearse! S’pose you never heard of burying a man on time! I’m a sexton, Sir, and undertaker—Jack Crossbones, at your service—‘Daddy Crossbones’ they call me at Porter’s.”

“Ah! I understand. Your mare ran away with the hearse.”

“Ran away! A child could hold her. Oh! yes, of course she ran away,” added the old gentleman, looking full in my face with a very quizzical expression, and putting the forefinger of his right hand on the right side of his party-coloured proboscis.

“My dear Sir,” said I, “you have excited my curiosity amazingly, and I should esteem it as a particular favour if you would be a little less oracular and a little more explicit.”

“I don’t know as I’d ought to tell you,” said my new acquaintance very slowly and tantalizingly. “If you was one of these here writing chaps, you might poke it in the ‘Spirit of the Times,’ and then it would be all day with me. But I don’t care if I do make a clean breast of it. Honour bright, you know.”

“Of course.”

“Well, then, I live a piece up beyond Old Cambridge—you can see our steeple off on a hill to the right, when we get a little further. Well, one day, I had a customer (he was carried off by typhus) which had to be toted into town—cause why? he had a vault there. So I rubbed down the old mare, and put her in the fills. Ah! Sir! that critter knows as much as an Injun, and more than a Nigger. She’s as sober as a judge when she gets the shop—that’s what I call the hearse—behind her. You would not think she was a three-minute nag, to look at her. Well, Sir, as luck would have it, by a sort of providential inspiration, the day before, I’d took off the old wooden springs and set the body on elliptics. For I thought it a hard case that a gentleman who’d been riding easy all his life, should go to his grave on wooden springs. Ah! I deal well by my customers. I thought of patent boxes to the wheels, but I couldn’t afford it, and the parish are desperate stingy.

“Well, I got him in, and led off the string—fourteen hacks, and a dearbourn wagon at the tail of the funeral. We made a fine show. As luck would have it, just as we came abreast of Porter’s, out slides that eternal torment, Bill Sikes, in his new trotting sulky, with the brown horse that he bought for a fast crab, and is mighty good for a rush, but hain’t got nigh so much bottom as the mare. Bill’s light weight, and his sulky’s a mere feather. Well, Sir, Bill came up alongside, and walked his horse a bit. He looked at the mare and then at me, and then he winked. Then he looked at his nag and put his tongue in his cheek, and winked. I looked straight ahead, and only said to myself, ‘Cuss you, Bill Sikes.’ By and bye, he let his horse slide. He travelled about a hundred yards, and then held up till I came abreast, and then he winked and bantered me again. It was aggravatin’, that’s a fact. Says I to myself, says I: ‘That’s twice you’ve done it, my buzzum friend and sweet-scented shrub—but you doesn’t do that ’ere again.’ The third time he bantered me I let him have it. It was only saying, ‘Scat you brute,’ and she was off—that mare. He had all the odds, you know, for I was toting a two hundred pounder, and he ought to have beat me like breaking sticks, now hadn’t he? He had me at the first brush, for I told you the brown horse was a mighty fast one for a little ways. But soon I lapped him. I had no whip, and he could use his string—but he had his hands full.

“Side by side, away we went—rattle-te-bang! crack! abuz! thump!—and I afraid of losing my customer on the road; but I was more afraid of losing the race. The reputation of the old mare was at stake, and I swore she should have a fair chance. We went so fast that the posts and rails by the road-side looked like a log fence. The old church and the new one, and the colleges, spun past like Merry-Andrews.

“The hackmen did not know what was to pay, and, afraid of not being in at the death, they put the string on to their teams, and came clattering on behind as if Satan had kicked ’em on eend. Some of the mourners was sporting characters, and they craned out of the carriage windows and waved their handkerchiefs. The President of Harvard College himself, inspired by the scene, took off his square tile as I passed his house, and waving it three times round his head, cried:

“ ‘Go it, Boots!’

“It is a fact. And I beat him, Sir! I beat him, in three miles, a hundred rods. He gin it up, Sir, in despair.”

“His horse was off his feed for a week, and when he took to corn again he wasn’t worth a straw. It was acknowledged on all hands to be the fastest funeral on record, though I say it as shouldn’t. I’m an undertaker, sir, and I never yet was over-taken.”

On subsequent inquiry at Porter’s, where the sporting sexton left me, I found that his story was strictly true in all the main particulars. A terrible rumpus was kicked up about the race, but Crossbones swore lustily that the mare had run away—that he had sawed away two inches of her lip in trying to hold her up, and that he could not have done otherwise, unless he had run her into a fence and spilled his “customer” into the ditch. If any one expects to die anywhere near the sexton’s diggings, I can assure them that the jolly old boy is still alive and kicking, the very “Ace of Hearts” and “Jack of Spades,” and that now both patent boxes and elliptic springs render his professional conveyance the easiest running thing on the road.