ON T&S MISSISSIPPI.
seemed best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napo-
leon, Their disapproval was prompt and loud; their language muti-
nous. 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 determina-
tion.
I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably
good success: under which encouragement, I increased my efforts;
and, to show them that /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 pen-
ram, la, Ejarlstrasse; 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
diem 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 stall forms, both great and small, was a ring ; and
from the ring a wire led ^o 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 beU
I imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the
dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a