superintendent of the mills. He must ask his mother what had become of Mary Watts. Of course, she was Mary Conyngham now. . . . It was odd, but she was the only person in the Town that he wanted to see. At last he had thought of some one.
On his way up the hill once more, he passed, near the establishment of McTavish, the undertaker, the tall, powerful, middle-aged figure of the Reverend Castor bound upon some errand. He was a rather handsome man, a little pompous but with a kind face, who was quite bald and wore the hair which the Lord had spared him very long and wound about his head, in a way calculated to conceal his baldness. People said he was a good man, and a fiery preacher with a wife who had been a complaining invalid for fifteen years and rarely left her bed. Philip scarcely knew him, though it was he who had married himself and Naomi and blessed them when they left for Africa. The clergyman did not see him now and Philip slipped by unnoticed.
From behind the glass of the Funeral Parlor, he knew that McTavish and his cronies had seen him. They sat in there hugging the stove, a group of middle-aged and elderly men who played checkers or rummy and gossiped all day. It was a great place for news, since most deaths were reported at once to the fat, good-natured McTavish. Every one was buried by McTavish; he was the one who laid the hill-ants to rest deep in the gravel of the seventh of these glacial hills. McTavish never went to church and the big iron stove was known, even on Sunday, as the nucleus of a band of shocking atheists and mockers. McTavish seemed to understand at once whether the one he had
