him all about my being a Brother
of Pity, and how I had wanted to bury a robin, and how I had found one,
and how he had frightened me by burying himself.

"Some other Brother of Pity must have found him," said my godfather,
still laughing. "And he must have got Jack the Giant-killer's cloak of
darkness for _his_ dress, so that you did not see him."

"There was nobody there," I earnestly answered, shaking my mask as I
thought of the still, lonely moonlight. "Nothing but two beetles, and I
said if they would take care of him they might be Brothers of Pity."

"They took you at your word, _mio fratello_. Take off your mask, which a
little distracts me, and I will tell you who buried Cock Robin."

I knew when Godfather Gilpin was really telling me things--without
thinking of something else, I mean,--and I listened with all my ears.

"The beetles whom you very properly admitted into your brotherhood,"
said my godfather, "were burying beetles, or sexton beetles,[A] as they
are sometimes called. They bury animals of all sizes in a surprisingly
short space of time. If two of them cannot conduct the funeral, they
summon others. They carry the bodies, if necessary, to suitable ground.
With their flat heads (for the sexton beetle does not carry a shovel as
you do) they dig trench below trench all round the body they are
committing to the earth, after which they creep under it and pull it
down, and then shovel away once more, and so on till it is deep enough
in, and then they push the earth over it and tread it and pat it neatly
down."

"Then was it the beetles who were burying the robin-redbreast?" I
gasped.

"I suspect so," said Godfather Gilpin. "But we will go and see."

He actually knocked a book down in his hurry to get his hat, and when I
helped him to pick it up, and said, "Why, godfather, you're as bad as I
was about Taylor's _Sermons_," he said, "I am an old fool, my dear. I
used to be very fond of insects before I settled down to the work I'm at
now, and it quite excites me to go out into the fields again."

I never had a nicer walk, for he showed me lots of things I had never
noticed, before we got to the quarry field; and then I took him straight
to the place where the bit of soft earth was, and there was nothing to
be seen, and the earth was quite smooth and tidy. But when he poked with
his stick the ground was very soft, and after he had poked a little we
saw some nut-brown feathers, and we knew it was Robin