none of them serious, which in the old days would
have been treated by a straightener. My father had already surmised that
the straightener had become extinct as a class, having been superseded by
the Managers and Cashiers of the Musical Banks, but this became more
apparent as he listened to the cases that next came on. These were dealt
with quite reasonably, except that the magistrate always ordered an
emetic and a strong purge in addition to the rest of his sentence, as
holding that all diseases of the moral sense spring from impurities
within the body, which must be cleansed before there could be any hope of
spiritual improvement. If any devils were found in what passed from the
prisoner's body, he was to be brought up again; for in this case the rest
of the sentence might very possibly be remitted.

When the Mayor and his coadjutors had done sitting, my father strolled
round the Musical Bank and entered it by the main entrance, which was on
the top of a flight of steps that went down on to the principal street of
the town. How strange it is that, no matter how gross a superstition may
have polluted it, a holy place, if hallowed by long veneration, remains
always holy. Look at Delphi. What a fraud it was, and yet how hallowed
it must ever remain. But letting this pass, Musical Banks, especially
when of great age, always fascinated my father, and being now tired with
his walk, he sat down on one of the many rush-bottomed seats, and (for
there was no service at this hour) gave free rein to meditation.

How peaceful it all was with its droning old-world smell of ancestor, dry
rot, and stale incense. As the clouds came and went, the grey-green,
cobweb-chastened, light ebbed and flowed over the walls and ceiling; to
watch the fitfulness of its streams was a sufficient occupation. A hen
laid an egg outside and began to cackle--it was an event of magnitude; a
peasant sharpening his scythe, a blacksmith hammering at his anvil, the
clack of a wooden shoe upon the pavement, the boom of a bumble-bee, the
dripping of the fountain, all these things, with such concert as they
kept, invited the dewy-feathered sleep that visited him, and held him for
the best part of an hour.

My father has said that the Erewhonians never put up monuments or write
epitaphs for their dead, and this he believed to be still true; but it
was not so always, and on waking his eye was caught by a monument of
great beauty, which bore a date of ab