o an egg; and if our patient
require twelve turns up and down the room, we will inquire with Argan,
whether they are to be measured by its length or breadth.

When we have added to our course some doses of religious horror, we shall
have done as much as conscience can demand of us toward filling the grave.

I may append here the remark, that if ever we do resolve to eat our
ancestors, there is the plan of a distinguished horticulturist apt for our
purpose. Mr. Loudon, I believe it was, who proposed, some years ago, the
conversion of the dead into rotation crops--that our grandfathers and
grandmothers should be converted into corn and mangel-wurzel. His
suggestion was to combine burial with farming operations. A field was to
be, during forty years, a place of interment: then the field adjacent was
to be taken for that purpose; and so on with others in rotation. A due
time having been allowed for the manure in each field to rot, the dead
were to be well worked up and gradually disinterred in the form of wheat,
or carrots, or potatoes.

Nothing appears odd to which we are accustomed. We look abroad and wonder,
but we look at home and are content. The Esquimaux believe that men dying
in windy weather are unfortunate, because their souls, as they escape,
risk being blown away. Some Negroes do not bury in the rainy season, for
they believe that then the gods, being all busy up above, can not attend
to any ceremonies. Dr. Hooker writes home from the Himalaya mountains,
that about Lake Yarou the Lamas' bodies are exposed, and kites are
summoned to devour them by the sound of a gong and of a trumpet made out
of a human thigh-bone. Such notions from abroad arrest our notice, but we
see nothing when we look at home. We might see how we fill our sick-rooms
with a fatal gloom, and keep our dead five or six days within our houses,
to bury them, side by side and one over another, thousands together, in
the middle of our cities. However, when we do succeed in getting at a view
of our own life _ab extra_, it is a pleasant thing to find that sanitary
heresies at any rate have not struck deep root in the British soil. In an
old book of emblems there is a picture of Cupid whipping a tortoise, to
the motto that Love hates delay. If lovers of reform in sanitary matters
hate delay, it is a pity; for our good old tortoise has a famous shell,
and is not stimulated easily.

IX. The Fire And The Dressing-Room.

Against the weather all