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Updated: May 26, 2025
I say, if the loyal dead, who are thus associated with the traitors who murdered them, put by the gentleman on the same footing with them, are to be treated as the 'common dead of the nation' I say, sir, if they could have heard the gentleman, they would have broken the cerements of the tomb, and stalked forth and haunted him until his eye-balls were seared."
With the night passed the storm which had rendered it so gloomy, and the fair cold day shone upon a world shrouded in icy cerements; a hushed, windless world, as full of glittering rime-runes as the frozen fields of Jotunheim.
The moonlight shone through many openings, lighting up the interior with a dim and ghostly radiance. There, swathed in crumbling cerements, ghastly in shrunken flesh and protruding bone, lay the dead of the line of Multnomah, the chiefs of the blood royal who had ruled the Willamettes for many generations.
The little wooden houses of the weavers, as well as the work-shops of the case-joiners and decorators, stood in numbers round the pattern-room; but the farthest off, and much the largest of the buildings of the establishment, was a very long low structure, solidly built of stone and well roofed in, where the prepared bodies were enveloped in their cerements, tricked out in amulets, and made ready for their journey to the next world.
The first room on the second storey is the Mummy Room; and there rest, side by side, royal personages and humble individuals, male and female, who, about four thousand years ago, breathed the air of Egypt. Except by their cerements, and the inscriptions on the cases, who could tell which had been the greater?
And there, near her bed, almost within reach of her hand, stood Madeline Payne, all swathed in white clinging cerements, ghastly as a corpse, hollow-eyed and awful, but, nevertheless, Madeline Payne! Over her white temples dropped rings of curly, yellow hair, and across the pale lips a mocking smile was flitting. Miss Arthur gasped and closed her eyes very tight, but they would not stay closed.
I would appeal to you, O disappointed, almost heart-broken man, who for years have endeavored to earn a competency to lift your head above the sheer necessities of life, but have failed in the chase, and been beaten back, and seen others who have exerted themselves not near as much, not so honorably, perhaps, rise to the very top of the stream and sail clear ahead; or to you, O "favorite of fortune," as the world calls you, who find your palace to be only a stately sepulchre, in which all genuine feeling and simple enjoyment lies dead and wrapped in cerements of chilling etiquette whose daughter, perhaps, has mocked your fondest plans; or whose son has turned out a miserable weed of dissipation a degenerate fopling, a rake, a fool; or to you, O butterfly of fashion, sailing with embroidered wings in search of admiration and of pleasure; or still again, to you who have just gathered together the means of enjoyment, and ease, and everything, to make life pleasant, and lo! death has entered, and your hopes are darkened and in the dust; I appeal to you, O types of this streaming humanity, that wears so many masks, yet, carries under all a common heart; and ask you, if there is not some void that no earthly good can fill that no finite thing can sustain and satisfy?
By this time the patient is generally in a profuse perspiration. William turned us round, and made us slip out of bed upon our feet; then slightly loosing the lower part of our cerements so that we could walk with difficulty, he took us by the shoulders and guided our unsteady steps out of our chamber, along a little passage, into an apartment containing a plunge bath.
"Yes, Willie," she whispered, "I feel as though it would be stepping over a very little stream to some new and beautiful shore." Doubtless, when a pure and great soul is close to eternity, ministering angels draw nigh to one soon to be of their number, and cast something of the peace and glory of their presence on the spirit yet held by its cerements of clay.
"My father, in Edith, my sister, our House has sacrificed enow to selfish power." "I grant it, to selfish power," answered the eloquent old man, "but not enow for England's safety. Look to it, Harold; thy years, and thy fame, and thy state, place thee free from my control as a father, but not till thou sleepest in thy cerements art thou free from that father thy land!
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