We were approaching Napoleon, Arkansas.
So I began to think about my errand there.
Time, noonday; and bright and sunny. This was
bad—not best, anyway; for mine was not
(preferably) a noonday kind of errand. The more
I thought, the more that fact pushed itself upon me—now
in one form, now in another. Finally, it took
the form of a distinct question: is it good common
sense to do the errand in daytime, when, by a little
sacrifice of comfort and inclination, you can have
night for it, and no inquisitive eyes around.
This settled it. Plain question and plain answer
make the shortest road out of most perplexities.
I got my friends into my stateroom, and said I was
sorry to create annoyance and disappointment, but
that upon reflection it really seemed best that we
put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon.
Their disapproval was prompt and loud; their language
mutinous. Their main argument was one which has
always been the first to come to the surface, in such
cases, since the beginning of time: ’But
you decided and agreed to stick to this boat,
etc.; as if, having determined to do an unwise
thing, one is thereby bound to go ahead and make two
unwise things of it, by carrying out that determination.
I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with
reasonably good success: under which encouragement,
I increased my efforts; and, to show them that I had
not created this annoying errand, and was in no way
to blame for it, I presently drifted into its history—substantially
as follows:
Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months
in Munich, Bavaria. In November I was living
in Fraulein Dahlweiner’s pension, 1a, Karlstrasse;
but my working quarters were a mile from there, in
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
