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If an average of ten years had been taken in the intervals of the returns of this dreadful disorder, or if the years of plague had been rejected as accidental, the registers would certainly give the proportion of births to burials too high for the real average increase of the population.
"O my good," interrupted the Master of Burials with a barren chuckle, and rubbing his hands with glee, "O my good, that was a day in a lifetime! I've done fine work in my time, but upon that day not a cloud above, no dust beneath, a flowing tide, and a calm sea.
A whole mummy in most fragile condition, so that it could not be lifted, was made up solid with 40 lb. of paraffin wax which was melted out of it afterwards in England, making hardly any change. If contracted burials should be preserved, dust carefully, splash on about 5 lb. of paraffin wax heated to smoking-point.
Then took place one of those shameful scenes, the necessary consequence of an ignoble and sacrilegious traffic, so frequent with regard to the burials of the poor, who cannot afford to pay for tapers, high mass, or violins for now St. Thomas Aquinas' Church has violins even for the dead. The old man stretched forth his hand to the sacristan to receive the brush.
The keeper, who is at once grave-digger and church-beadle thus making a double profit out of the parish corpses has taken advantage of the unused plot of ground to plant potatoes there. From year to year, however, his small field grows smaller and when there is an epidemic, he does not know whether to rejoice at the deaths or regret the burials.
Once, after a busy six months, in which a fever had carried off many a Jersiais, the Master of Burials had given a picnic to his apprentices, workmen, and their families. At this buoyant function he had raised his glass and with playful plaintiveness proposed: "The day we celebrate!" He was in a no less blithesome mood this day.
Let the marriage be there, she thought in that place where never anything but burials has been known before. Could she have changed the one service into the other, she would have done so. And yet she would not go back, for it was the least of two evils.
With a snarl the Master of Burials seized a pen and wrote in the account: Item: To extra satin for pillow, three livres.
Here no burials took place, and instead of graves appeared their tiny huts arranged in neat streets and squares. In these they and their forefathers had dwelt from time immemorial; indeed, each little hut with a few yards of fenced-in ground about it ornamented with dwarf trees, was a freehold that descended from father to son.
It is perfectly possible that he is, after all, and it is our business to trace him, if he is still in the land of the living. Jervis and I can carry out these investigations without saying anything to Bellingham; my learned brother will look through the register of burials not forgetting the cremations in the metropolitan area, and I will take the other matter in hand."
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