virtues as well as for her great natural and acquired
perfections."

These were suffering souls and great. Would they have been so great had
they not suffered? Who can tell? Were the waters troubled in order that
they might heal the people?

Did Swift misuse this excellent woman, is a question that has been asked
and answered again and again.

A great author has written:

"A woman, a tender, noble, excellent woman, has a dog's heart. She licks
the hand that strikes her. And wrong nor cruelty nor injustice nor
disloyalty can cause her to turn."

Death in pity took Stella first; took her in the loyalty of love and the
fulness of faith from a world which for love has little recompense, and
for faith small fulfilment.

Stella was buried by torchlight, at midnight, on the Thirtieth day of
January, Seventeen Hundred Twenty-eight. Swift was sick at the time, and
wrote in his journal: "This is the night of her funeral, and I am removed
to another apartment that I may not see the light in the church which is
just over against my window." But in his imagination he saw the gleaming
torches as their dull light shone through the colored windows, and he
said, "They will soon do as much for me."

But seventeen years came crawling by before the torches flared, smoked
and gleamed as the mourners chanted a requiem, and the clods fell on the
coffin, and their echoes intermingled with the solemn voice of the priest
as he said, "Dust to dust, ashes to ashes."

In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-five, the graves were opened and casts taken
of the skulls. The top of Swift's skull had been sawed off at the
autopsy, and a bottle in which was a parchment setting forth the facts
was inserted in the head that had conceived "Gulliver's Travels."

I examined the casts. The woman's head is square and shapely. Swift's
head is a refutation of phrenology, being small, sloping and ordinary.

The bones of Swift and Stella were placed in one coffin, and now rest
under three feet of concrete, beneath the floor of Saint Patrick's.

So sleep the lovers joined in death.

WALT WHITMAN

All seems beautiful to me.
I can repeat over to men and women, You have done
such good to me I would do the same to you,
I will recruit for myself and you as I go.
I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,
I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them.
--_Song of the Open Road_

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