Tales and Fantasies


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and trumpets of old tombs, the paths worn by the feet of  
worshippers and mourners, and the offerings and the  
inscriptions of bereaved affection. To rustic  
neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious,  
and where some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire  
society of a parish, the body-snatcher, far from being  
repelled by natural respect, was attracted by the ease and  
safety of the task. To bodies that had been laid in earth,  
in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there  
came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the  
spade and mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements  
torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after  
being rattled for hours on moonless byways, were at length  
exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of gaping  
boys.  
Somewhat as two vultures may swoop upon a dying lamb, Fettes  
and Macfarlane were to be let loose upon a grave in that  
green and quiet resting-place. The wife of a farmer, a woman  
who had lived for sixty years, and been known for nothing but  
good butter and a godly conversation, was to be rooted from  
her grave at midnight and carried, dead and naked, to that  
far-away city that she had always honoured with her Sunday's  
best; the place beside her family was to be empty till the  
crack of doom; her innocent and almost venerable members to  
be exposed to that last curiosity of the anatomist.  
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Page
135 136 137 138 139

Quick Jump
1 61 122 182 243