Most of the women at poor Abel Edwards's funeral were worn and old
before their prime, their mouths sunken, wearing old women's caps
over their locks at thirty. Their decent best gowns showed that
piteous conservation of poverty more painful almost than squalor.

The men were bent and gray with the unseen, but no less tangible,
burdens of life. Scarcely one there but bore, as poor Abel Edwards
had borne, a mortgage among them. It was a strange thing that
although all of the customary mournful accessories of a funeral were
wanting, although no black coffin with its silent occupant stood in
their midst, and no hearse waited at the door, yet that mortgage of
Abel Edwards's--that burden, like poor Christian's, although not of
sin, but misfortune, which had doubled him to the dust--seemed still
to be present.

The people had the thought of it ever in their minds. They looked at
Ann Edwards and her children, and seemed to see in truth the mortgage
bearing down upon them, like a very shadow of death.

They looked across at Doctor Seth Prescott furtively, as if he might
perchance read their thoughts, and wondered if he would foreclose.

Doctor Prescott, in his broadcloth surtout, with his black satin
stock muffling richly his stately neck, sat in the room with the
mourners, directly opposite the Edwards family. His wife was beside
him. She was a handsome woman, taller and larger than her husband,
with a face of gentlest serenity set in shining bands of auburn hair.
Mrs. Doctor Prescott looked like an empress among the other women,
with her purple velvet pelisse sweeping around her in massive folds,