The
Resurrection Man - to use a byname of the period - was not to
be deterred by any of the sanctities of customary piety. It
was part of his trade to despise and desecrate the scrolls
and trumpets of old tombs, the paths worn by the feet of
worshippers and mourners, and the offerings and the
inscriptions of bereaved affection. To rustic
neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious,
and where some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire
society of a parish, the body-snatcher, far from being
repelled by natural respect, was attracted by the ease and
safety of the task. To bodies that had been laid in earth,
in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there
came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the
spade and mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements
torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after
being rattled for hours on moonless byways, were at length
exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of gaping
boys.
Somewhat as two vultures may swoop upon a dying lamb, Fettes
and Macfarlane were to be let loose upon a grave in that
green and quiet resting-place. The wife of a farmer, a woman
who had lived for sixty years, and been known for nothing but
good butter and a godly conversation, was to be rooted from
her grave at midnight and carried, dead and naked, to that
far-away city that she had always honoured with her Sunday's
best; the place beside her family was to be empty till the
crack of doom; her innocent and almost venerable members to
be exposed to that last curiosity of the anatomist.
Pages:
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128