stalactites from the roof of a cave, a quantity of clothes - the clothes of the dead and
buried shows of the coach-house.
We had been excited in the highest degree by seeing the Custodians pull off their coats
and tuck up their shirt-sleeves, as the procession came along. It looked so interestingly
like business. Shut out in the muddy street, we now became quite ravenous to know all
about it. Was it river, pistol, knife, love, gambling, robbery, hatred, how many stabs, how
many bullets, fresh or decomposed, suicide or murder? All wedged together, and all
staring at one another with our heads thrust forward, we propounded these inquiries and a
hundred more such. Imperceptibly, it came to be known that Monsieur the tall and sallow
mason yonder, was acquainted with the facts. Would Monsieur the tall and sallow mason,
surged at by a new wave of us, have the goodness to impart? It was but a poor old man,
passing along the street under one of the new buildings, on whom a stone had fallen, and
who had tumbled dead. His age? Another wave surged up against the tall and sallow
mason, and our wave swept on and broke, and he was any age from sixty-five to ninety.
An old man was not much: moreover, we could have wished he had been killed by
human agency - his own, or somebody else's: the latter, preferable - but our comfort was,
that he had nothing about him to lead to his identification, and that his people must seek
him here. Perhaps they were waiting dinner for him even now? We liked that. Such of us
as had pocket-handkerchiefs took a slow, intense, protracted wipe at our noses, and then
crammed our handkerchiefs into the breast of our blouses. Others of us who had no
handkerchiefs administered a similar relief to our overwrought minds, by means of
prolonged smears or wipes of our mouths on our sleeves. One man with a gloomy
malformation of brow - a homicidal worker in white-lead, to judge from his blue tone of
colour, and a certain flavour of paralysis pervading him - got his coat-collar between his
teeth, and bit at it with an appetite. Several decent women arrived upon the outskirts of
the crowd, and prepared to launch themselves into the dismal coach-house when
opportunity should come; among them, a pretty young mother, pretending to bite the
forefinger of her baby-boy, kept it between her rosy lips that it might be handy for
guiding to point at the show. Meantime, all faces were turned towards the building, and
we men waited with a fixed and stern resolution:- for the most part with folded arms.
Surely, it was the only public French sight these uncommercial eyes had seen, at which
the expectant people did not form EN QUEUE. But there was no such order of
arrangement here; nothing but a general determination to make a rush for it, and a
disposition to object to some boys who had mounted on the two stone posts by the hinges
of the gates, with the design of swooping in when the hinges should turn.
Now, they turned, and we rushed! Great pressure, and a scream or two from the front.
Then a laugh or two, some expressions of disappointment, and a slackening of the
pressure and subsidence of the struggle. - Old man not there.
'But what would you have?' the Custodian reasonably argues, as he looks out at his little
door. 'Patience, patience! We make his toilette, gentlemen. He will be exposed presently.
It is necessary to proceed according to rule. His toilette is not made all at a blow. He will
be exposed in good time, gentlemen, in good time.' And so retires, smoking, with a wave
