On sunny days, pretty little chameleons—­gracefullest of legged reptiles—­creep along the marble fronts of the vaults, and catch flies.  Their changes of color—­as to variety—­are not up to the creature’s reputation.  They change color when a person comes along and hangs up an immortelle; but that is nothing:  any right-feeling reptile would do that.

I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards.  I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot accomplish it.  I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it.  It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible.  Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages, when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground, to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the air with disease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must die before their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now, when even the children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse.  It is a grim sort of a thought.  The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have now, after nineteen hundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen.  But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics, within a generation after St. Anne’s death and burial, made several thousand people sick.  Therefore these miracle-performances are simply compensation, nothing more.  St. Anne is somewhat slow pay, for a Saint, it is true; but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years, and outlawed by the statute of limitations, than not paid at all; and most of the knights of the halo do not pay at all.  Where you find one that pays—­like St. Anne—­you find a hundred and fifty that take the benefit of the statute.  And none of them pay any more than the principal of what they owe—­they pay none of the interest either simple or compound.  A Saint can never quite return the principal, however; for his dead body kills people, whereas his relics Heal only—­they never restore the dead to life.  That part of the account is always left unsettled.

’Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne, after fifty years of medical practice, wrote:  “The inhumation of human bodies, dead from infectious diseases, results in constantly loading the atmosphere, and polluting the waters, with not only the germs that rise from simply putrefaction, but also with the specific germs of the diseases from which death resulted.”

’The gases (from buried corpses) will rise to the surface through eight or ten feet of gravel, just as coal-gas will do, and there is practically no limit to their power of escape.

’During the epidemic in New Orleans in 1853, Dr. E. H. Barton reported that in the Fourth District the mortality was four hundred and fifty-two per thousand—­more than double that of any other.  In this district were three large cemeteries, in which during the previous year more than three thousand bodies had been buried.  In other districts the proximity of cemeteries seemed to aggravate the disease.