Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 July 1883 — A FLOATING FUNERAL. [ARTICLE]

A FLOATING FUNERAL.

Masked Mourners Carrying Their Dead Through the Streets After Nightfall. [From T. B. Aldrich's New Book.] The night of our arrival was one of those unearthly moonlight nights that belong to Italy. The Arno, changed to a stream of quicksilver, flowed swiftly through the stone arches of the Ponte Vecchio under our windows, and lured me with its beauty out of doors, though a great dock somewhere near by just clanged 11. By an engraving I had seen in my boyhood I recognized the bridge of Taddeo Gaddi, with its goldsmith shops on either side. They were closed now, of course. I strolled across the bridge and back again, once or twice, and then wandered off into a net-work of dingy streets, traversed by one street so very narrow that you saw only a hand’s breadth of amethystine sky between the lops of the tall buildings. Standing iu the middle of the thoroughfare, I could almost touch the shutters of the shops right and left. At the upper end of the street, which was at least three-quarters of a mile in' length, the overhanging fronts of the lofty houses seemed to meet and shut out the dense moonlight. In the desKrate straggle which took place there tween the moon and the gloom a hundred fantastic shadows slipped from coign and cornice and fell into the street below like besiegers flung from the ramparts of some old castle. Not a human being or a liiht was anywhere visible. Suddenly I saw'what, for an instant, I took to be a falling star in. the extreme distance. It approached in a zigzag course. It broke into several stars; these grew larger; then I discovered they were torches. A low, monotonous chant, like the distant chorus of demonsin an opera, reached my ear. The chant momentarily increased ip distinctness, and, as the torches drew nearer, I saw that they were carried by fifteen or twenty persons marching in a square, in the middle of which was a bier supported by a number of ghostly figures. The procession was sweeping down on me at the rate of six miles an hour; the training pall flapped in the wind caused by the velocity of the march. When the cortege was within twenty or thirty yards of me, I noticed that the trestlebearers and the persons who held the flambeaux were shrouded from forehead to foot in white sheets, with holes pierced for the eyes. I never beheld anything so devilish. On they came, occupying the whole width of the narrow street. I had barely time to crowd myself into a projecting doorway when they swept by with a rhythmical swinging gait, to the measure of the awful threnody. I waited until the muffled chant melted into the distance, and then I made a bee-line for the hotel.