82 THE COFFIN MAKER. 



I carried about with me an unceasing curse; an imaginary 

 barrier separated me from my fellow men. I felt like an execu- 

 tioner, from whose bloody touch men shrink, not so much from 

 loathing of the man, who is but the instrument of death, as from 

 horror at the image of that death itself — death, sudden, appalling, 

 and inevitable. Like him, I brought the presence of death too 

 vividly before them ; like him, 1 was connected with the infliction 

 of a doom I had no power to avert. Men withheld from me 

 their affection, refused me their sympathy, as if I were not like 

 themselves. My very mortality seemed less obvious to their 

 imaginations when contrasted with the hundreds for wfiom my 

 hand prepared the last narrow dwelling house, which was to 

 shroud for ever their altered faces from sorrowful eyes. Where 

 I came, there came heaviness of heart, mourn fulness, and 

 weeping. Laughter was hushed at my approach ; conversation 

 ceased; darkness and silence fell around my steps — the darkness 

 and the silence of death. Gradually I became awake to my 

 situation. I no longer attempted to hold free converse with my 

 fellow men. I suffered the gloom of their hearts to overshadow 

 mine. My step crept slowly and stealthily into their dwellings ; 

 my voice lowered itself to sadness and monotony ; I pressed no 

 hand in token of companionship ; no hand pressed mine, except 

 when wrung with agony, some wretch, whose burden was more 

 than he could bear restrained me for a few moments of maddened 

 and ccmvulsive grief, from putting the last finishing stroke to my 

 work, and held me back to gaze yet again on features which I 

 was about to cover from his sight. It is well that God, in his 

 unsearchable wisdom, hath made death loathsome to us. It is 

 well that an undefined and instinctive shrinking within us, makes 

 what we have loved for lonof years, in a few hours 



" That lifeless thing, the living fear." 



It is well that the soul hath scarcely quitted the body ere the 

 work of corruption is begun. For if, even thus, mortality clings 

 to the remnants of mortality, with ' love stronger than death;' if, 

 as T have seen it, warm and living lips are pressed to features 

 where the gradually sinking eye and hollow cheek speak horribly 

 of departed life ; what would it be if the winged soul left its 

 tenement of clay, to be resolved only into a marble death ; to re- 

 main cold, beautiful, and imperishable ; every day to greet our 

 eyes; every night to be watered with our tears ? The bonds 

 which hold men together would be broken ; tlie future would lose 

 its interest in our minds; we should remain sinfully mourning 



