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THE CABINET OF NATURAL HISTORY 



saw something that made me speedily forget the old woman, 

 though what it was I did see, I could not, in the first mo- 

 ments of amazement and horror, very distinctly compre- 

 hend. 



"Above a hundred dead bodies lay and sat before my 

 eyes, all of them apparently in the very attitude or pos- 

 ture in which they died. I looked at them for at least a 

 minute, before I knew they were all corpses. Something 

 in the mortal silence of the place told me that I alone was 

 alive in this dreadful company. A desperate courage ena- 

 bled me then to look stedfastly at the scene before me. 

 The bodies were mostly clothed in mats and rugs, and tat- 

 tered great-coats; some of them merely wrapped round with 

 girdles of straw; and two or three perfectly naked. Every 

 face had a different expression, but all painful, horrid, ago- 

 nized, bloodless: many glazed eyes were wide open; and, 

 perhaps, this was the most shocking thing in the whole 

 spectacle. So many eyes that saw not, all seemingly fixed 

 upon different objects; some cast up to heaven, some look- 

 ing strait forward, and some with the white orbs turned 

 round, and deep sunk in the sockets. 



"It was a sort of hospital. These wretched beings were 

 mostly all desperately or mortally wounded ; and after 

 having been stripped by their comrades, they had been left 

 there dead and to die. Such were they, who, as the old 

 hag said, would not trouble me. 



"I had begun to view this ghastly sight with some com- 

 posure, when I saw, at the remotest part of the hospital, a 

 gigantic figure sitting, covered with blood, and almost naked, 

 upon a rude bedstead, with his back leaning against the 

 wall, and his eyes fixed directly on mine. I thought he was 

 alive, and shuddered; but he was stone dead. In the last 

 agonies he had bitten his under lip almost entirely off, and 

 liis long black beard was drenched in clotted gore, that like- 

 wise lay in large blots on his shaggy bosom. One of his 

 hands had convulsively grasped the wood-work of the bed- 

 stead, which had been crushed in the grasp. I recognised 

 the corpse. He was a serjeant in a grenadier regiment, 

 and, during the retreat, distinguished for acts of savage 

 valour. One day he killed, with his own hand, Harry 

 Warburton, the right hand man of my own company, per- 

 haps the finest made and most powerful man in the British 

 army. My soldiers had nick-named him with a very 

 coarse appellation, and I really felt as if he and I were ac- 

 quaintances. There he sat, as if frozen to death. I went 

 up to the body, and raising up the giant's muscular arm, it 

 fell down again with a hollow sound against the bloody side 

 of the corpse. 



"My eyes unconsciously wandered along the walls. 

 They were covered with grotesque figures and caricatures 

 of the English, absolutely drawn in blood. Horrid blas- 



phemies, and the most shocking obscenities in the shape of 

 songs, were in like manner written there ; and you may 

 guess what an effect they had upon me, when the wretches 

 who had conceived them lay all dead corpses around my 

 feet. I saw two books lying on the floor; I lifted them up; 

 one seemed to be full of the most hideous obscenity; the 

 other was the Bible. It is impossible to tell you the horror 

 produced in me by the circumstance. The books fell from 

 my hand; they fell upon the breast of one of the bodies; it 

 was a woman's breast. A woman had lived and died in 

 such a place as this! What had been in that heart, now 

 still, perhaps only a few hours before, I knew not. It is 

 possible, love, strong as death; love, gviilty, abandoned, de- 

 praved, and linked by vice unto misery: but still love, that 

 perished but with the last throb, and yearned in the last 

 convulsion towards some one of these grim dead bodies. I 

 think some such idea as this came across me at the time; or 

 has it now only arisen ? 



"JNear this corpse lay that of a perfect boy, certainly not 

 more than seventeen years of age. There was a little cop- 

 per figure of the Virgin Mary round his neck, suspended 

 by a chain of hair. It was of little value, else it had not 

 been suffered to remain there. In his hand was a letter; I 

 saw enough to know that it was from his mother; — Blon 

 chere Jils, ^-c. It was a terrible place to think of mother — 

 of home — of any social human ties. Have these ghastly 

 things parents, brothers, sisters, lovers? Were they once 

 all happy in peaceful homes? Did these convulsed, and 

 bloody, and mangled bodies once lie in undisturbed beds? 

 Did those clutched hands once press in infancy a mother's 

 breast? Now all was loathsome, terrible, ghostlike. Hu- 

 man nature itself seemed here to be debased and brutified. 

 Will such creatures, I thought, ever live again? Why 

 should they? Robbers, ravishers, incendiaries, murderers, 

 suicides, (for a dragoon lay with a pistol in his hand, and 

 his skull shattered to pieces,) heroes! The only two pow- 

 ers that reigned here were agony and death. Whatever 

 might have been their characters when alive, all faces were 

 now alike. I could not, in those fixed extortions, tell what 

 was pain from what was anger — misery from wickedness. 



"It was now almost dark, and the night was setting in 

 stormier than the day. A strong flash of lightning sudden- 

 ly illuminated this hold of death, and for a moment showed 

 me more distinctly the terrible array. A loud squall of 

 wind came round about the building, and the old window 

 casement gave way, and fell with a shivering crash in upon 

 the floor. Something rose up with an angry growl from 

 amongst the dead bodies. It was a huge dark-coloured wolf 

 dog, with a spiked collar round his neck; and seeing me, he 

 leaped forwards with gaunt and bony limbs. I am confi- 

 dent that his jaws were bloody. I had instinctively moved 



