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And there are no funerals in the country. That is a word, funeral, of too forbidding, ominous, a sound to be under the broad and open sky. There where the neighbours gather, all those who knew and loved the departed from a boy, the “last sad rites are read,” and the “mortuary services are performed.” Then from the fruitful valley where he dwelt after his fathers, and their fathers, he mounts again the old red hill, bird enchanted.

He is not buried, though he rests in the warm clasp of the caressing earth. Buried has an inhuman sound, as though a man were a bone. The deceased is always “interred,” or he may be “laid to rest,” or his “interment takes place.”

Now, it is in these biographical annals of small places that one finds the justest estimates of life. There folks are valued for what they are as well as for what they do. Inner worth is held in regard equally with the flash and glitter of what the great world calls success. I was reading just the other day of a late gentleman, “aged 61,” whose principal concern appeared to be devotion to his family. His filial feeling was indeed remarkable. It was told that “after the death of his parents, three years ago, he had resided with his sister.” After his attachment to his own people, his chief interest, apparently, was in the things of the mind, in literature. He had “never engaged in business,” it was said, but he “was a great reader,” he could “talk intelligently on many topics which interested him,” and in the circles which he frequented he was admired, that is it was thought that he was “quite a bright man.” Who would not feel in this sympathetic record of his goodly span something of the charm of the modest nature of this man? Again, there was the recent intelligence concerning William Jackson, “a coloured gentleman employed as a deck hand on a pleasure craft in this harbour,” who “met his demise” in an untimely manner. Clothes do not make the man, nor doth occupation decree the bearing. This is a great and fundamental truth very clearly grasped by the country obituary, and much obscured elsewhere.

On the other hand, positively nowhere else does the heart to dare and the power to do find such generous recognition as in the obituaries of country papers. The “prominence” of blacksmiths, general store keepers, undertakers, notaries public, and other townspeople bright in local fame has been made a jest by urban persons of a humorous inclination, who take scorn of merit because it is not vast merit. Pleasing to contemplate in contrast to this waspish spirit is the noble nature of the country obituary, inspiration to humanism. Here was a man, to the seeing eye, of sterling stamp: “He attended public grammar school where he profited by his opportunities in obtaining as good an education as possible, etc.” Later in life, be became “well and favourably known for his conservative and sane business methods,” and was esteemed by his associates, it is said, “fraternally and otherwise.” He was “mourned,” by those who “survived” him, as people are not mourned in cities, that is, frankly, in a manner undisguised. Country obituaries are not afraid to be themselves. In this is their appeal to the human heart.

They are the same in spirit, identical in turn of phrase, from Maine to California, from the Gulf to the Upper Provinces. That is one of the remarkable things about them. You might expect to come across, here or there, a writer of country paper obituaries out of step, as it were, with his fellow mutes, so to put it, one raising his voice in a slightly off, or different key, a trace, in short, of the hand of some student of the modes of thought of the world beyond his bosky dell or rolling plain. But it is not so in any paper truly of the countryside. And, perhaps, that is well.