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NECESSITY MAKES STRANGE FUNERAL

Young Father Buries Babe in death Cradle of Own Make

He did the best he could with what he had. No man could do more. So a baby lies sleeping in the Old DeWitt cemetery in a home‑made casket, trimmed and fashioned by its young and inexperienced father. The tiny bit of humanity, born into a luckless world, has fulfilled a natural law. Old Mother Earth has reclaimed that to which she contributed. The young father sorrows and the mother, lying patiently ill from her first great effort to maintain the race, also grieves.

Sunday's rain pattered gently on the new‑made grave. The heavens wept in sympathy for the young parents who had hoped to save their first‑born. The tiny body ‑ perhaps it was a Providential dispensation that this bit of humanity should not he compelled to live and face that for which it is blameless ‑ reposes in the dignity of Death's sleep. It will never know the pangs its brief burgeoning into the world has cost its grieving parents.

When the child died after struggling to maintain life for a single day, the father, distracted by troubles, wrought his best with the means at hand. Pressed by sickness of the weakened wife and unemployment, he courageously faced this last blow, the death of his first‑born and its attendant expense. Finding that he was unable to buy a regular infant's casket, he made his own plans for his baby.

He visited a north side merchant whom he had patronized during his short married life and asked for a wooden box. The merchant had none. Wooden boxes are seldom used to pack merchandise in these modern times, paper cartons being substituted. So the young father bought the lumber ‑ it didn't require so much of nature's wood for the purpose for which it was needed. He made the tiny coffin and trimmed and lined its interior himself.

The baby, an expired hope of the young parents, was lovingly placed in the home‑made casket. Funeral services were brief. The child's pain‑racked mother could not be present at the brief rites nor could she console, with her presence, the sorrowing father. He was alone with his troubles and responsibilities. With a friendly local undertaker, the lone young man was driven to the old DeWitt cemetery, the sleeping babe in its crude pine cradle, resting upon the father's knees. Probably he had often dreamed, during that Interesting period before the child was born, of holding Us first born in loving arms, rocking it to sleep and cuddling and loving it as do all real fathers. He had never, however, envisioned such a journey as this.

The child was laid gently in earth to return to the dust from which it sprang. But in its crudely fashioned Death cradle, wrought with loving and tender hands, its sleep will he as sweet and peaceful, no doubt, as in the more formal commercial. casket which the poor young father could not afford for his first born.

But even though the child know, she need not be ashamed. Her daddy did his best for her, his very best. Let it he a consoling thought. There have been unloving, hardened, neglectful parents who do not even try.