est odour that I could detect, though he had been corporal and
stalwart, his face now the colour of dark ashes, in each hollow cheek a
ragged hole about the size of a sixpence, the flimsy vaulted eye-lids
well embedded in their caverns, from under whose fringe of eye-lash
seemed whispered the word: '_Eternity._' His hair seemed very long for a
policeman, or perhaps it had grown since death; but what interested me
about him, was the envelope at his hand: for 'what,' I asked myself,
'was this fellow doing here with an envelope at three o'clock on a
Sunday afternoon?' This made me look closer, and then I saw by a mark at
the left temple that he had been shot, or felled; whereupon I was
thrown into quite a great rage, for I thought that this poor man was
killed in the execution of his duty, when many of his kind perhaps, and
many higher than he, had fled their post to pray or riot. So, after
looking at him a long time, I said to him: 'Well, D. 47, you sleep very
well: and you did well, dying so: I am pleased with you, and to mark my
favour, I decree that you shall neither rot in the common air, nor burn
in the common flames: for by my own hand shall you be distinguished with
burial.' And this wind so possessed me, that I at once went out: with
the crow-bar from the car I broke the window of a near iron-monger's in
Parliament Street, got a spade, and went into Westminster Abbey. I soon
prised up a grave-slab of some famous man in the north transept, and
commenced to shovel: but, I do not know how, by the time I had digged a
foot the whole impulse passed from me: I left off the work, promising to
resume it: but nothing was ever done, for the next day I was at
Woolwich, and busy enough about other matters.

* * * * *

During the next nine days I worked with a fever on me, and a map of
London before me.

There were places in that city!--secrets, vastnesses, horrors! In the
wine-vaults at London Docks was a vat which must certainly have
contained between twenty and thirty thousand gallons: and with dancing
heart I laid a train there; the tobacco-warehouse must have covered
eighty acres: and there I laid a fuse. In a house near Regent's Park,
standing in a garden, and shut from the street by a high wall, I saw a
thing...! and what shapes a great city hid I now first know.

* * * * *

I left no quarter unremembered, taking a train, no longer of four, but
of eight,