man's head slightly move! A shiver, I
confess, ran through me. A moment's reflection, however, reminded me
of the recognised deceitfulness of the eyes in such matters, and I did
not doubt that I had been mistaken. But the next minute I again saw
the dead priest slightly shake his head, and this time I was sure that
I was not mistaken. I clutched my mother's arm and pointed, and again
saw the awful phenomenon, which sent a cold wave through both of us
from head to foot. But nobody save ourselves seemed to have seen
anything unusual. The service was proceeding in its wonted order.
Doubting whether it might possibly be one of those horrible cases of
suspended animation and mistaken death, I was thinking whether it were
not my duty to call attention to the startling thing we had seen,
and had with outstretched neck and peering eyes advanced a step for
further observation, and with the half-formed purpose of declaring
aloud that the man was not dead, when I spied crouched beneath the
bier a little monkey, some nine or ten years old, who had taken in his
hand the tassel of the cap, which hung down between the wooden bars
which formed the bier, and was amusing himself with slowly swaying it
forwards and backwards, and had thus communicated the motion to the
dead man's head! It was almost impossible to believe that the little
urchin had been able to reach the position he occupied without having
been observed by any of the clerical attendants, of whom several were
present, and still more difficult to suppose that no one of them had
seen what we saw, standing immediately in front of the corpse while
one of them performed the rite of lustration with holy water, the
vessel containing which was held by another. But no one interfered,
and none but those who know the Florentines as well as I know them can
feel how curiously and intensely characteristic of them was the fact
that no one did so. The awful reverence for death which would
have impelled an Englishman of almost any social position to feel
indignation and instantly put a stop to what he would consider a
profanation, was absolutely unknown to all those engaged in that
perfunctory rite. A certain amount of trouble and disturbance would
have been caused by dislodging the culprit, and each man there felt
only this; that it didn't matter a straw, and that there was no reason
for _him_ to take the trouble of noticing it. As far as I could
observe, the amusement the little wretch de