and fifty years ago."

This business-like way of illustrating a touching story of the heart by

laying the several fragments of the lover before us and naming them, was

as grotesque a performance, and as ghastly, as any I ever witnessed. I

hardly knew whether to smile or shudder. There are nerves and muscles in

our frames whose functions and whose methods of working it seems a sort

of sacrilege to describe by cold physiological names and surgical

technicalities, and the monk's talk suggested to me something of this

kind. Fancy a surgeon, with his nippers lifting tendons, muscles and

such things into view, out of the complex machinery of a corpse, and

observing, "Now this little nerve quivers--the vibration is imparted to

this muscle--from here it is passed to this fibrous substance; here its

ingredients are separated by the chemical action of the blood--one part

goes to the heart and thrills it with what is popularly termed emotion,

another part follows this nerve to the brain and communicates

intelligence of a startling character--the third part glides along this

passage and touches the spring connected with the fluid receptacles that

lie in the rear of the eye. Thus, by this simple and beautiful process,

the party is informed that his mother is dead, and he weeps." Horrible!

I asked the monk if all the brethren up stairs expected to be put in this

place when they died. He answered quietly:

We must all lie here at last."

343

The Innocents Abroad