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And what lent additional horror to the circumstances of these burials was, that those engaged in this duty would occasionally drop lifeless during their labour. So that it sometimes happened the dead-carts were found without driver, linkman, or bell-man. And it was estimated that the parish of Stepney alone lost one hundred and sixteen gravediggers and sextons within that year.
There were no flies here, thus there were no worms to devour the carcasses; but the usual sextons were the crows, although sometimes too few to perform their office.
Wool-carding in Barchester there was no longer any; so the bishop, dean, and warden, who took it in turn to put in the old men, generally appointed some hangers-on of their own; worn-out gardeners, decrepit grave-diggers, or octogenarian sextons, who thankfully received a comfortable lodging and one shilling and fourpence a day, such being the stipend to which, under the will of John Hiram, they were declared to be entitled.
Above all, the sacred fig-tree and other spots and notable objects in the city were associated with a great multitude of sextons' tales of the same nature as those out of which, upwards of a thousand years afterwards, there grew up on the same ground the Mirabilia Urbis.
Let us complain as loudly as we can of its creating a new rate to defray the expenses of its working, and let us endeavor to get up a good howl against that clause of it which provides for compensation to incumbents, clerks, and sextons.
Sometimes for two, three, four minutes, the profound interest of what I read would fix my mind, and then I would peruse an entire column, or two, without consciousness of the meaning of one single word, my brain all drawn away to the innumerable host of the wan dead that camped about me, pierced with horror lest they should start, and stand, and accuse me: for the grave and the worm was the world; and in the air a sickening stirring of cerements and shrouds; and the taste of the pale and insubstantial grey of ghosts seemed to infect my throat, and faint odours of the loathsome tomb my nostrils, and the toll of deep-toned passing-bells my ears; finally the lamp smouldered very low, and my charnel fancy teemed with the screwing-down of coffins, lych-gates and sextons, and the grating of ropes that lower down the dead, and the first sound of the earth upon the lid of that strait and gloomy home of the mortal; that lethal look of cold dead fingers I seemed to see before me, the insipidness of dead tongues, the pout of the drowned, and the vapid froths that ridge their lips, till my flesh was moist as with the stale washing-waters of morgues and mortuaries, and with such sweats as corpses sweat, and the mawkish tear that lies on dead men's cheeks; for what is one poor insignificant man in his flesh against a whole world of the disembodied, he alone with them, and nowhere, nowhere another of his kind, to whom to appeal against them?
Thirdly, from a usual practice of the sextons in burning the bodies of the dead, it is evident that females are hotter than males; for the bedsmen are wont to put one female body with ten males upon the same pile, for that contains some inflammable and oily parts, and serves for fuel to the rest.
The head sexton to the cathedral whom you must not confound with a gravedigger, as you might an ordinary sexton; cathedral sextons are personages of more importance was seated about this hour at supper in his home, close to the cathedral. Suddenly the deep-toned college bell boomed out, and the man started as if a gun had been fired at him.
It were a pity indeed if the people of Stockbridge had not by that time become familiar with the sound of the old Indian conch-shell which since the mission church was founded at the first settlement of the town had served instead of a meeting-house bell. It may be well believed that strong lungs were the first requisite in sextons of that day.
And it is only the grasses and the poppies that hide the bones of men we've never yet put underground. Nature has been one of our chief sextons, here at Verdun. I wish you could have seen the poppies a few months ago, mixed with blue marguerites and cornflowers that we call 'bluets. We used to say that our dead were lying in state under the tricolour flag of France.
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