The long coffin stood on a trestle in the middle of the room. It seemed tremendously large and imposing. The mouse-like little woman was claiming more attention now than she had ever done in all the forty-odd years of her drab existence. Bill sat at the head, staring straight before him. The children, with red eyes and dazed, frightened faces, sat along one side. Aunt Abigail and several other near relatives, with solemn faces and handkerchiefs in their hands, completed the circle about the bier. The other mourners stood or sat against the walls. Several of the women were crying. The three women who had laid out Aunt Annie and had not shed a tear at her death, were all weeping copiously now.
The preacher was young, insignificant, and ineffectual, a poor wisp of humanity, who had probably drifted into preaching because it was the only thing that he could do, and had been elbowed into this remote corner by the law of the survival of the fittest. In the flat, empty voice of one who has sounded no depths of life, he spoke feebly of the virtues of the "dear departed sister," offered a sort of canned consolation to the "bereaved husband and children," and mumbled a few concluding words about the "hope of a glorious resurrection."
Then Jabez Moorhouse rose to the six feet three inches of his height.
"Friends an' neighbors," he said, standing simply with his hands in his pockets and speaking in the tone of one talking across the kitchen stove, "the Reverend Mister Spragg has spoke the blessin' of the church over Aunt Annie Pippinger that lies here in the coffin. But not many of us is church goers an' the Reverend Mister Spragg is not much acquainted among us. The Bible says, 'Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.' So I can't let this moment go by without risin' to my feet to offer our respects as friends an' neighbors to the memory of one o' the kindest, best-hearted and hardest-workin' wimmin in the whole of Scott County. Solomon, the wise man, says, 'The heart knoweth its own bitterness.' An' we all know that talk don't do much to help them that suffers. But I feel I speak for all of us here when I say how sad we feel for Bill Pippinger an' for these motherless little uns an' how we're all a-standin' here ready to do what we kin to make this loss easier for him to bear. Amen. Let us all sing, 'Nearer, my God, to Thee.'"