ie in a week's time and is shut up
in a prison from which it is certain that he cannot escape, he will
always hope that a reprieve may come before the week is over. Besides,
the prison may catch fire, and he may be suffocated not with a rope, but
with common ordinary smoke; or he may be struck dead by lightning while
exercising in the prison yards. When the morning is come on which the
poor wretch is to be hanged, he may choke at his breakfast, or die from
failure of the heart's action before the drop has fallen; and even though
it has fallen, he cannot be quite certain that he is going to die, for he
cannot know this till his death has actually taken place, and it will be
too late then for him to discover that he was going to die at the
appointed hour after all. The Erewhonians, therefore, hold that death,
like life, is an affair of being more frightened than hurt.

They burn their dead, and the ashes are presently scattered over any
piece of ground which the deceased may himself have chosen. No one is
permitted to refuse this hospitality to the dead: people, therefore,
generally choose some garden or orchard which they may have known and
been fond of when they were young. The superstitious hold that those
whose ashes are scattered over any land become its jealous guardians from
that time forward; and the living like to think that they shall become
identified with this or that locality where they have once been happy.

They do not put up monuments, nor write epitaphs, for their dead, though
in former ages their practice was much as ours, but they have a custom
which comes to much the same thing, for the instinct of preserving the
name alive after the death of the body seems to be common to all mankind.
They have statues of themselves made while they are still alive (those,
that is, who can afford it), and write inscriptions under them, which are
often quite as untruthful as are our own epitaphs--only in another way.
For they do not hesitate to describe themselves as victims to ill temper,
jealousy, covetousness, and the like, but almost always lay claim to
personal beauty, whether they have it or not, and, often, to the
possession of a large sum in the funded debt of the country. If a person
is ugly he does not sit as a model for his own statue, although it bears
his name. He gets the handsomest of his friends to sit for him, and one
of the ways of paying a compliment to another is to ask him to sit for
such a s