aving, as it were, trimmed the nails and
combed the beard of the great spectre, retired with a valet's bow.
Observing that Charlemagne had lost most of his nose, he caused it
to be replaced in gold very delicately chiseled and enchased. The
sacrilege was repeated by Frederick Barbarossa in 1165, who went
farther and forced Charlemagne to get up from his chair before him.
The corpse, in rising, fell in pieces, which have been dispersed
through Europe as relics. We saw such of them as remain here at the
Chapelle. I was allowed, for about the equivalent of an American
dollar, to measure the Occidental emperor's leg--they call it his arm.
And then, as a makeweight in the bargain, the venal sacristan placed
in my hands the head of Charlemagne.

I thought Hohenfels would have sunk to the ground with disgust. He
colored deeply and dragged me into the air. "I am ashamed of every
drop of German blood in my veins," he cried. "What are we to think of
the commerce of these wretches, for whom the very wounds of Caesar are
the lips of a money-box?"

I had given back the skull, as Hamlet returns the skull of Yorick to
the grave-digger, and was dusting my fingers with a handkerchief,
as hundreds of Hamlets have dusted theirs. I said, "'Thrift, thrift,
Horatio.'"

"At Kreutzberg there are twenty monks on the counter! This morning, at
St. Ursula's, it was the eleven thousand virgins, their skulls ranged
like Dutch cheeses above our heads or in rows around the walls, with
a battery-full of them in the neighboring apartment, like a
cheesemonger's reserved magazine. Here, the very leader of modern
ideas, the creator of our form of civilization, is shown for so
many pennies to any grocer who wants to weigh the head of a king!
Profanation! Barbarians! Philistines!"

[Illustration: THE SKELETON IN ARMOR.]

I turned rather hastily, while my hands were yet clammy with the
skull, thinking that this accusation of Philistinism was aimed at me.
But Hohenfels thought of nothing less than of a personality, being
in his cloudiest mood of generalization. So I only concealed the
handkerchief, while I said, as easily as I might, "You need not accuse
your German blood, for I have lived long enough in my American's
Paradise to know that civilized Paris is considerably worse in this
particular respect, with the addition of a certain goblin levity
particularly French. How often have I seen babies frightened by the
skulls in the dentists' windows, with