It was a little after two when we were admitted to the mortuary parlors by a disheveled and grumpy housekeeper who, having been so long in the society of cadavers, seemed to have lost the use of her voice and addressed to us a solitary grunt, presumably intended as a command to us to follow her. We waited for Mr. Greeley in a small, cold room, immoderately decorated with rubber plants which had grown to a disquieting height, and furnished with seedy leather rocking-chairs. Perhaps I only imagined it, but it seemed to me that under the smell of disinfectant that pervaded the house, there was the rank odor of putrefaction, and I whispered to Mrs. Henderson, “Oh, let’s go home! I’m frightened!” But the undertaker had entered the room. He greeted us with as warm a smile as his parody of a face could muster and said, “Ah, ah, then you have found a way to get the little boy a headstone. Well, I’m glad, indeed I am. I hope you’ll take my jewel, my roses. He will sleep better beneath it.”

“No, sir,” I said. “We can’t have a funeral after all. But there is something else . . . Mrs. Henderson, you tell him.”

The woman told him my mother’s plan, and as she talked he pulled the ends of his mustache, exclaiming softly, “Ridiculous! Fantastic! What on earth!” And when she had finished, he rose to his full, improbable height and declared, “One may not cast a body into the street or into a running stream, or into a hole in the ground, or make any disposition of it that might be regarded as creating a nuisance or be injurious to the health of the community. This is the law, Madam. And ‘running stream’ can, in this instance, refer to the water of the bay or of the ocean. Do you think that I care to be apprehended by the Boston Harbor Police? Do you think that you have the authority to do what you wish with this body?”

I could feel the large and abundant tears crawling down my cheeks at his impressionistic yet graphic picture of my brother’s corruption. Seeing my misery, he was gentler when he spoke again and even laid his hairy hand, which wore a Masonic ring, on my jerking shoulder.

“Look here, young lady,” he said, “you let me bury him now as I planned and if you get some money some day, we will disinter the body and start all over again. All right?”

I nodded my head, for I could not speak. I heard Mrs. Henderson inquire if she might at least supervise the dressing of the child for whom she had had so great an affection and heard the undertaker refuse. She took me by the elbow and I rose. “God bless him,” she said, and as we left the room, Mr. Greeley’s voice came to us in a clatter of enthusiasm. “I hope you will be able to get my rose piece! The best of luck to you!”