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 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 widow kept straight on, till she had got out the fact that I was a stranger and an American.  The man’s face changed at once; brightened, became even eager—­and the next moment he and I were alone together.

I opened up in cast-iron German; he responded in quite flexible English; thereafter we gave the German language a permanent rest.