by law. If the "dead" awake in that time it is well. If not, they are doomed, and no one—not even a father or a mother, a husband or a wife—can save them from the hands of the grave-digger. This was the case with the poor woman of Molise. Her friends had doubts as to one, at least, of the deaths—that of the unborn babe—but the doctor was inexorable. He refused to operate on the "corpse" to save the infant-life, and the syndic, approving of his conduct, ordered the body to be buried. The funeral took place exactly at the twenty-fourth hour—that is to say that the body (being a poor one) was thrown into the ground like a dog. Dog-like, too, it had no rights, for a few days afterward it was unearthed to make room for another corpse—that of a girl—which was to be thrown in over it. But the becchini (the grave-diggers) perceived while doing their work that the woman buried the week before "had moved in the grave." Her hands were up to her mouth; her eyes were wide open and staring frightfully—she had been trying to bite the bands by which her wrists were fastened. But the bands of her legs were rent asunder, and there, in the dust beside her, was a dead child! The woman and the babe (a boy) whom law and medical incapacity had slain were taken out of the earth to be medically examined and legally provided for, and the new corpse (was it a corpse?) was thrown in in their stead. The doctor and the syndic were arrested, and condemned to three months' imprisonment, and the mother and child were buried again with two medical certificates instead of one. The legal authorities—somewhat late in the day—wished to do everything in "proper form," and the child, born in the grave, procured for its mother a second burial.
This horrible crime—the crime of burying a woman alive and murdering an unborn babe five or six feet underground by medical sanction—could with difficulty have occurred in England. English law provides an interval of a week (more or less) between death and burial, and the seeming-dead may in a week's time return to life—that is to say, that the body, with the suspended life dormant within it, may, by chance or by medical treatment, reassume its functions, or a portion of its functions, before burial has become a legal or a sanitary necessity; but it can not be stated with certainty that all persons buried in a northern climate—such a climate, for instance, as England—are in reality dead after the delay of a week has been accorded. Hasty and sudden burials are not always a question of climate or of temperature. In times of pestilence the week's delay is in many cases, even in northern climates, reduced to a few hours; and in Italy, where the minimum interval between death and burial is a day and a night, and the maximum two days and two nights, the victims (or the supposed victims) of epidemic are buried as soon as dead—that is to say, as soon as they appear to be dead, which, in exceptional times, amounts much to the same thing. The manifest blunder is that of supposing all dead persons—i. e., all persons dying in days of pestilence—to be
