The Cincinnati daily star. [volume] ([Cincinnati, Ohio]) 1875-1880, 1880-01-12

way of testifying to the grief their en-
pfsyers are supposed to feel, and the lat
ter sppear to be afflicted in proportion as
they have money to supply funeral
feasts to their surviving friends, these
being frequently continued. until the
"mourners" are wholly ruined financial
ly. In Arabia women monopolize the
mourning business
These stain their hands and feel with
indigo for eight days, during which
period their minds are too gloomy to
drink milk or any white liquid, while
the hired mourning women dance in
front of the house and tear their hair
like lot of viragoes. The Chinese put
on all white, even down to their shoe
strings, and if it is husband or parent
that is deceased, failure to do the pre-
scribed thing is visited, according to law,
with years banishment and sixty
blows. For a father or mother they
have to mourn three years, and if an
ofice-holder happen to be bereaved he
can not continue to perform any public
duties whatever, which must be an in
convenient thing for politician; nor if
deceased is near relative, must they
shave their heads for thirty days.
japanese put on white and stay at home
for fifty days, and must not for that
period eat meat nor drink saki, which is
the Japanese for Peoria tanglefoot.
After this they second mourn for thir-
teen months. Laboring people need not
mourn at all, but some of them do for
two or three days. Genteel Feejee wo-
men burn their own bodies, and for ten
or twenty days fast all day until sunset
If it is for chief, fifty or hundred
people have each finger amputated to
hang above the dead mans tomb.
Mourning of some kind appears to be
a custom publicly INDUCED in by nearly
all nations. ancient and modern, and in
all ages the methods for doing this suita-
bly, have been prescribed more or less
frequently by law. With us, and in
these days, custom DEGREES the statutes
regulating this, and usually proclaims
the edict in fashion magazine; but no
fashionable amplitude of Grape and bonn
bazine raiment in which a mourning fe-
male ever swathed herself has ever i'm
pressed us as more truly typifying the
sincerity of the grief that was felt than
at the funeral of child the other day,
where the littlv coffin was carried away
in an express wagon, in which the mother
also rode to the grave in faded shawl
and one poor little bow of black ribbon
on her bonnet, the sole outward sign
of the almost heartbroken agony
of the bereavement. If it is
absolutely essential to the feelings of
surviving friends to cover their bodies
with black clothes, in token of their
grief for the loss of deceased persons, we
can not quite perceive the propriety of
fashioning these into the same elaborate
methods as for garments worn on festive
occasions, nor in decking the person in
ornaments cunningly wrought, albeit.in
jet, and banging the hair and powdering
the skin, and scenting ones self with
musk and frangipanni, and fading out
again, as it were, through the gradations
of gray and violet into the colors of the
rainbow, after the period socially die
tated to deep and mitigated mourning.
We can not, as above observed, perceive
the propriety of this, but we take it that
it must, nevertheless, exist, and is one of
the mysteries that puzzle us in finite
things almost every day Of our lives
one of the things, in short, that to a
"feller" is entirely past finding out.