A Funeral in the Holy Land

       We saw to-day a procession, mostly dressed in black, approaching. Soon we heard the wailing of many women. It was a sad moaning outcry. They followed an ornamented box which contained the dead body of a girl. At the front of the box was a pole on which was a sort of cap with locks of the hair of the deceased floating from beneath it. On the same covered pole were some adornments which I imagine had been worn by the deceased during her lifetime. The box was on the shoulders of four men. The procession of weeping women was led by one whom I supposed to be the mother of the dead child. She had in her hands a narrow piece of blue cloth about a yard long, which she lifted into the air, now by one hand and now by the other, and as if in effort to break it and no doubt carrying out the oriental custom of rending in grief. I thought I could see her sorrow was genuine, and it was the real mother bewailing her dead, and so no doubt there was as much heart-break in the lamentation as there is when an American mother bemoans her childlessness. There may also have been other relatives in the throng who were agonized. But the most of the crowd seemed to dramatize bereavement, and careful inspection discovered the tearless eyes, and that they were enacting something that seemed called for by the proprieties of the occasion. The corpse was carried into a sacred enclosure, and two or three men went through genuflexions which meant no doubt much to them but nothing to us; meanwhile the women of the procession sat down at the distance of a city block away from the enclosure, but the men sat nearer by. Then the box with the floating tresses of the departed girl was brought out and the procession resumed its march to the grave and the wild and bitter cry again ascended. I followed to the gates of the cemetery and was passing in, when my friend called attention to the fact that we had no right to enter. Some twenty of the women were, by angry voice and violent gesticulation, forbidding our going in. They evidently discovered that we were strangers and of another nationality and religion, and our intrusion would be a sacrilege. So we halted, but we had seen for the fin; time the type of an oriental burial. It was to us a deeply sad and solemn spectacle. No element of the ludicrous disturbed our minds as others have sometimes been impressed. While the grief of the mother stirred our sympathies, the affectation of sorrow by others was only what we have witnessed in civilized lands, where sometimes a long row of carriages and a profusion of crape and costly silver handles to a casket mean nothing except that the funeral must be fashionable, although perhaps the most of the people in the procession are glad the old man is at last dead, for now there will be a distribution of his property.

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