e body of the big laborer lay,
wrapped in a sheet.

"We bury him Friday, poor chap! Fine big man, too!" And at the warder's
words a shudder passed through Felix. The frozen tranquillity of that
body!

As the carved beauty of great buildings, so is the graven beauty of
death, the unimaginable wonder of the abandoned thing lying so quiet,
marvelling at its resemblance to what once lived! How strange this
thing, still stamped by all that it had felt, wanted, loved, and hated,
by all its dumb, hard, commonplace existence! This thing with the calm,
pathetic look of one who asks of his own fled spirit: Why have you
abandoned me?

Death! What more wonderful than a dead body--that still perfect work of
life, for which life has no longer use! What more mysterious than this
sight of what still is, yet is not!

Below the linen swathing the injured temples, those eyes were closed
through which such yearning had looked forth. From that face, where the
hair had grown faster than if it had been alive, death's majesty had
planed away the aspect of brutality, removed the yearning, covering all
with wistful acquiescence. Was his departed soul coherent? Where was it?
Did it hover in this room, visible still to the boy? Did it stand
there beside what was left of Tryst the laborer, that humblest of all
creatures who dared to make revolt--serf, descendant of serfs, who,
since the beginning, had hewn wood, drawn water, and done the will
of others? Or was it winged, and calling in space to the souls of the
oppressed?

This body would go back to the earth that it had tended, the wild grass
would grow over it, the seasons spend wind and rain forever above it.
But that which had held this together--the inarticulate, lowly spirit,
hardly asking itself why things should be, faithful as a dog to those
who were kind to it, obeying the dumb instinct of a violence that in his
betters would be called 'high spirit,' where--Felix wondered--where was
it?

And what were they thinking--Nedda and that haunted boy--so
motionless? Nothing showed on their faces, nothing but a sort of living
concentration, as if they were trying desperately to pierce through
and see whatever it was that held this thing before them in such awful
stillness. Their first glimpse of death; their first perception of that
terrible remoteness of the dead! No wonder they seemed to be conjured
out of the power of thought and feeling!

Nedda was first to turn away. Walking back by