l church.
The Resurrection Man--to use a by-name of the period--was not to be
deterred by any of the sanctities of customary piety. It was part of his
trade to despise and desecrate the scrolls and trumpets of old tombs,
the paths worn by the feet of worshippers and mourners, and the
offerings and the inscriptions of bereaved affection. To rustic
neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious, and where
some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire society of a parish,
the body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was
attracted by the ease and safety of the task. To bodies that had been
laid in earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there
came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and
mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy
relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless
byways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class
of gaping boys.

Somewhat as two vultures may swoop upon a dying lamb, Fettes and
Macfarlane were to be let loose upon a grave in that green and quiet
resting-place. The wife of a farmer, a woman who had lived for sixty
years, and been known for nothing but good butter and a godly
conversation, was to be rooted from her grave at midnight and carried,
dead and naked, to that far-away city that she had always honoured with
her Sunday's best; the place beside her family was to be empty till the
crack of doom; her innocent and almost venerable members to be exposed
to that last curiosity of the anatomist.

Late one afternoon the pair set forth, well wrapped in cloaks and
furnished with a formidable bottle. It rained without remission--a cold,
dense, lashing rain. Now and again there blew a puff of wind, but these
sheets of falling water kept it down. Bottle and all, it was a sad and
silent drive as far as Penicuik, where they were to spend the evening.
They stopped once, to hide their implements in a thick bush not far from
the churchyard, and once again at the Fisher's Tryst, to have a toast
before the kitchen fire and vary their nips of whisky with a glass of
ale. When they reached their journey's end the gig was housed, the horse
was fed and comforted, and the two young doctors in a private room sat
down to the best dinner and the best wine the house afforded. The
lights, the fire, the beating rain upon the window, the cold,
incongruous work that lay bef