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