emainder of what? Of nature
first, and then of society. Naught, and yet total.

The lawless inclemency of the weather held it at its will; the deep
oblivion of solitude environed it; it was given up to unknown chances;
it was without defence against the darkness, which did with it what it
willed. It was for ever the patient; it submitted; the hurricane (that
ghastly conflict of winds) was upon it.

The spectre was given over to pillage. It underwent the horrible outrage
of rotting in the open air; it was an outlaw of the tomb. There was no
peace for it even in annihilation: in the summer it fell away into dust,
in the winter into mud. Death should be veiled, the grave should have
its reserve. Here was neither veil nor reserve, but cynically avowed
putrefaction. It is effrontery in death to display its work; it offends
all the calmness of shadow when it does its task outside its laboratory,
the grave.

This dead thing had been stripped. To strip one already
stripped--relentless act! His marrow was no longer in his bones; his
entrails were no longer in his body; his voice no longer in his throat.
A corpse is a pocket which death turns inside out and empties. If he
ever had a Me, where was the Me? There still, perchance, and this was
fearful to think of. Something wandering about something in chains--can
one imagine a more mournful lineament in the darkness?

Realities exist here below which serve as issues to the unknown, which
seem to facilitate the egress of speculation, and at which hypothesis
snatches. Conjecture has its _compelle intrare_. In passing by certain
places and before certain objects one cannot help stopping--a prey to
dreams into the realms of which the mind enters. In the invisible there
are dark portals ajar. No one could have met this dead man without
meditating.

In the vastness of dispersion he was wearing silently away. He had had
blood which had been drunk, skin which had been eaten, flesh which had
been stolen. Nothing had passed him by without taking somewhat from
him. December had borrowed cold of him; midnight, horror; the iron,
rust; the plague, miasma; the flowers, perfume. His slow disintegration
was a toll paid to all--a toll of the corpse to the storm, to the rain,
to the dew, to the reptiles, to the birds. All the dark hands of night
had rifled the dead.

He was, indeed, an inexpressibly strange tenant, a tenant of the
darkness. He was on a plain and on a hill, and _he was not_. He