By and by came three or four withered
women and stood whispering around the corpse, peering at it through
their spectacles, holding up their skinny hands, shaking their
night-capped heads, and taking counsel of one another's experience
what was to be done.
With those tire-women we left Zenobia.
XXVIII. BLITHEDALE PASTURE
Blithedale, thus far in its progress, had never found the necessity
of a burial-ground. There was some consultation among us in what
spot Zenobia might most fitly be laid. It was my own wish that she
should sleep at the base of Eliot's pulpit, and that on the rugged
front of the rock the name by which we familiarly knew her, Zenobia,--
and not another word, should be deeply cut, and left for the moss
and lichens to fill up at their long leisure. But Hollingsworth (to
whose ideas on this point great deference was due) made it his
request that her grave might be dug on the gently sloping hillside,
in the wide pasture, where, as we once supposed, Zenobia and he had
planned to build their cottage. And thus it was done, accordingly.
She was buried very much as other people have been for hundreds of
years gone by. In anticipation of a death, we Blithedale colonists
had sometimes set our fancies at work to arrange a funereal ceremony,
which should be the proper symbolic expression of our spiritual faith
and eternal hopes; and this we meant to substitute for those
customary rites which were moulded originally out of the Gothic gloom,
and by long use, like an old velvet pall, have so much more than
their first death-smell in them.
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