the house of a widow
who supported herself by taking lodgers. She and her two young children
used to drop in every morning and talk German to me--by request. One
day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one of the two
establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses until the
doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance
state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six
corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted
boards, in three long rows--all of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and
all of them wrapped in white shrouds. Along the sides of the room were
deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these lay several marble-
visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks of fresh flowers,
all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger of each of these
fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring; and from the ring a
wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder,
where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring
to the aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall
make a movement--for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the
wire and ring that fearful bell. I imagined myself a death-sentinel
drowsing there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty
night, and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly
by the sudden clamor of that awful summons! So I inquired about this
thing; asked what resulted usually? if the watchman died, and the
restored corpse came and did what it could to make his last moments
easy. But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle and frivolous
curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went my way with a
humbled crest.

Next morning I was telling the widow my adventure, when she exclaimed--

'Come with me! I have a lodger who shall tell you all you want to know.
He has been a night-watchman there.'

He was a living man, but he did not look it. He was abed, and had his
head propped high on pillows; his face was wasted and colorless, his
deep-sunken eyes were shut; his hand, lying on his breast, was talon-
like, it was so bony and long-fingered. The widow began her introduction
of me. The man's eyes opened slowly, and glittered wickedly out from
the twilight of their caverns; he frowned a black frown; he lifted his
lean hand and waved us peremptorily away. But the wid