looking down at the body with a similar expression
—as if it were made in another likeness
from herself, had been informed with other
passions, had been lost by other chances, had
had another nature dragged down to perdition—
steered a spurning streak of mud at it, and
passed on.

A better experience, but also of the Morgue
kind, in which chance happily made me useful
in a slight degree, arose to my remembrance as
I took my way by the Boulevart de Sébastopol
to the brighter scenes of Paris.

The thing happened, say five-and-twenty years
ago. I was a modest young uncommercial then,
and timid and inexperienced. Many suns and
winds have browned me in the line, but those
were my pale days. Having newly taken the
lease of a house in a certain distinguished
metropolitan parish—a house which then appeared to
me to be a frightfully first-class Family Mansion,
involving awful responsibilities—I became the
prey of a Beadle. I think the Beadle must have
seen me going in or coming out, and must have
observed that I tottered under the weight of my
grandeur. Or, he may have been in hiding
under straw when I bought my first horse (in
the desirable stable-yard attached to the
first-class Family Mansion), and when the vendor
remarked to me, in an original manner, on bringing
him for approval, taking his cloth off, and
smacking him, "There Sir! There's a Orse!"
And when I said gallantly, "How much do you
want for him?" and when the vendor said, "No
more than sixty guineas, from you," and when I
said smartly, "Why not more than sixty from
me?" And when he said crushingly, "Because
upon my soul and body he'd be considered cheap
at seventy, by one who understood the subject—
but you don't." I say, the Beadle may have
been in hiding under straw, when this disgrace
befel me, or he may have noted that I was too
raw and young an Atlas to carry the first-class
Family Mansion in a knowing manner. Be this
as it may, the Beadle did what Melancholy did
to the youth in Gray's Elegy—he marked me
for his own. And the way in which the Beadle
did it, was this: he summoned me as a Juryman
on his Coroner's Inquests.

In my first feverish alarm I repaired "for
safety and for succour"—like those sagacious
Northern shepherds who, having had no previous
reason whatever to believe in young Norval,
very prudently did. not originate the hazardous
idea of believing in him—to a deep householder.
This profound man informed me that the Beadle
counted on my buying him off; on my bribing
him not to summon me; and that if I would
attend an Inquest with a cheerful countenance,
and profess alacrity in that branch of my country's
service, the Beadle would be disheartened,
and would give up the game.

I roused my energies, and the next time the
wily Beadle summoned me, I went. The Beadle
was the blankest Beadle I have ever looked on
when I answered to my name; and his discomfiture
gave me courage to go through with it.

We were impannelled to inquire concerning
the death of a very little mite of a child. It was
the old miserable story. Whether the mother had
committed the minor offence of concealing the
birth, or whether she had committed the major
offence of killing the child, was the question
on which we were wanted. We must commit her
on one of the two issues.

The Inquest came off in the parish workhouse,
and I have yet a lively impression that I was
unanimously received by my brother Jurymen
as a brother of the utmost conceivable insignificance.
Also, that before we began, a broker
who had lately cheated me fearfully in the
matter of a pair of card-tables, was for the
utmost rigour of the law. I remember that we
sat in a sort of board-room, on such very large
square horse-hair chairs that I wondered what
race of Patagonians they were made for; and
further, that an undertaker gave me his card
when we were in the full moral freshness of
having just been sworn, as "an inhabitant that
was newly come into the parish, and was likely
to have a young family." The case was then
stated to us by the coroner, and then we went
down stairs—led by the plotting Beadle—to
view the body. From that day to this, the poor
little figure on which that sounding legal
appellation was bestowed, has lain in the same place,
and with the same surroundings, to my thinking.
In a kind of crypt devoted to the warehousing
of the parochial coffins, and in the midst
of a perfect Panorama of coffins of all sizes, it
was stretched on a box; the mother had put it
in her box—this box—almost as soon as it was
born, and it had been presently found there. It
had been opened, and neatly sewn up, and
regarded from that point of view, it looked like a
stuffed creature. It rested on a clean white
cloth, with a surgical instrument or so at hand,
and regarded from that point of view, it looked
as if the cloth were "laid," and the Giant were
coming to dinner. There was nothing repellant
about the poor piece of innocence, and it
demanded a mere form of looking at. So, we looked
at an old pauper who was going about among
the coffins with a foot rule, as if he were a case
of Self-Measurement; and we looked at one
another; and we said the place was well
white-washed any how; and then our conversational
powers as a British Jury flagged, and the fore
man said, "All right, gentlemen? Back again,
Mr. Beadle!"

The miserable young creature who had given
birth to this child within a very few days, and who
had cleaned the cold wet door-steps immediately
afterwards, was brought before us when we
resumed our horse-hair chairs, and was present
during the proceedings. She had a horse-hair
chair herself, being very weak and ill; and I
remember how she turned to the unsympathetic
nurse who attended her, and who might have
been the figure-head of a pauper-ship, and how
she hid her face and sobs and tears upon that
wooden shoulder. I remember, too, how hard
her mistress was upon her (she was a servant-of-
all-work), and with what a cruel pertinacity
that piece of Virtue spun her thread of evidence