delayed just as it was to-day. There was only this difference, that then she often put out of the window her little head, decked with flowers, her lovely, lively face lit by the moon, and manifested the most charming vexation and impatience at the delay. Now she was quite still, and probably very blue; but ever and anon, when the mourning-horses of the hearses stamped and grew unruly, it seemed to me as if the dead themselves were growing impatient, and, tired of waiting, were in a hurry to get into their graves; and when, at the cemetery gate, one coachman tried to get before another, and there was disorder in the queue, then the gendarmes came in with bare sabres; here and there were cries and curses, some vehicles were overturned, coffins rolling out burst open, and I seemed to see that most horrible of all émeutes—a riot of the dead.[1]
To spare the feelings of my readers, I will not
- ↑ The reader will excuse the remark that nine-tenths of all which constituted the external horrors of the cholera or other great pestilences would have been avoided by the very simple process of cremation. It is said that even within a very few years, in breaking up the ground where great numbers of victims of cholera or yellow fever were long since buried, the most deadly forms of disease or malaria have been developed, which could not assuredly have taken place had the remains been reduced to ashes. When I, in 1856, published an article advocating the burning of the dead, I was literally alone in my ideas. Eppur si muove.—Translator.
