Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 October 1883 — Wanted a Cheap Funeral. [ARTICLE]

Wanted a Cheap Funeral.

George F. Barstow, of San Francisco, who left an estate valued at $80,000, gave these injunctions in his will: “Having observed that ostentation and expensive funerals are injurious to the people, often absorbing money which poverty cannot well spare to vanity and pride, therefore, by way of example, for which I beg pardon of the undertakers, let my coffin be a plain redwood box, put together with common hails or screws, without paint or Varnish, with plain iron handles, and all else about the funeral to correspond with this plainness. Let there be a cheap shroud and no flowers. What is a dead man, but a handful of dust? Instead of a hearse I may just as well be carried to the grave upon some ordinary vehicle in every-day use, since life is but a journey and the day of death the final Onb of the most important of the mercantile institutions of Berlin is an Egg Exchange. As the city consumes more than 12,000,000 dozens of eggs annually, it is a business of very great importance. Kentucky Colonels are said to be amazed at the statement that it took Prince Alexander, of Hesse Caassel, thirty years to become a ColoneL M. Worth, the Parisian fashion king, is 55 years old, fat, pleasant-looking, and most impressively bald-headed.