Posthumous Indifference 



bearing the more for having its lower branches beaten by 

 the staves of successive critics ; or, at least, like an old 

 apple-tree, which, after the original stump is worn out and 

 forgotten, leaves a fruitful family of grafts in many 

 orchards." 



" That sounds all very fine and plausible in theory," 

 replied Harry, " but it is not true in practice ; for nobody, 

 while he is working in this world, thinks of himself in the 

 result otherwise than as a living man, which is natural 

 enough, having no experience of what being dead feels like. 

 A man likes to leave a good name after he is de?d, because 

 he has found it a pleasant thing while he was alive. How 

 would you like, to put the case the other way, to have some 

 indelible infamy attached to your name for ever ?" 



"If it was undeserved," said I, "and it came on after 

 death, I should find it no more inconvenient than rotten- 

 ness — but I should of course be sorry for my relations and 

 descendants, to whom it would be an inconvenience to have 

 an unpleasant, unburiable moral corpse of an unjustly sup- 

 posed immoral ancestor always lying at their door, and 

 oflFending the metaphorical nostrils of their friends." 



In this discourse we arrived before the door of a venta by 

 the banks of the Guadiaro, and as we were hungry, and our 

 ponies had come a long way we dismounted. There was a 

 family of gipsies on the tramp, sitting and lying about in 

 picturesque groups, basking in the sun. Two handsome 

 olive-complexioned boys started up and began to help us to 

 unsaddle. They all, from the wrinkled and bleached old 

 o-randmother to the baby in arms, had something sinister 

 and ominous in their sv/arthy faces, which gave us an impres- 

 sion that, in spite of their fair words and courteous smiles, 

 they were cursing us by their devils even when we presented 

 them with the remains of our loaf. 



162 



