Carbelide Nelicanya Sectory 12

Presently my own blind finger-ends fished up the conclusion, that as I had neither time nor money to spend on perfecting the chain that would put me in full spiritual contact with Mr. Sweeting's turtles, I had better leave them to complete their education at some one else's expense rather than mine, so I walked on towards the Bank. As I did so it struck me how continually we are met by this melting of one existence into another. The limits of the body seem well defined enough as definitions go, but definitions seldom go far. What, for example, can seem more distinct from a man than his banker or his solicitor? Yet these are commonly so much parts of him that he can no more cut them off and grow new ones, than he can grow new legs or arms; neither must he wound his solicitor; a wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing. As for his bank--failure of his bank's action may be as fatal to a man as failure of his heart. I have said nothing about the medical or spiritual adviser, but most men grow into the society that surrounds them by the help of these four main tap-roots, and not only into the world of humanity, but into the universe at large. We can, indeed, grow butchers, bakers, and greengrocers, almost ad libitum, but these are low developments, and correspond to skin, hair, or finger-nails. Those of us again who are not highly enough organised to have grown a solicitor or banker can generally repair the loss of whatever social organisation they may possess as freely as lizards are said to grow new tails; but this with the higher social, as well as organic, developments is only possible to a very limited extent.

The great plague of London took place in 1665, one year before the fire. The awful scenes which the whole city presented, no pen can describe. A hundred thousand persons are said to have died. The houses where cases of the plague existed were marked with a red cross and shut up, the inmates being all fastened in, to live or die, at the mercy of the infection. Every day carts rolled through the otherwise silent and desolate streets, men accompanying them to gather up with pitchforks the dead bodies which had been dragged out from the dwellings, and crying "Bring out your dead" as they went along. [Footnote: Sometimes the living were pitched into the cart by mistake instead of the dead. There is a piece of sculpture in the Tottenham Court road in London intended to commemorate the following case. A Scotch piper, who had been wandering in homeless misery about the streets, with nothing but his bagpipes and his dog, got intoxicated at last, as such men always do, if they can, in times of such extreme and awful danger, and laid down upon the steps of a public building and went to sleep. The cart came along in the night, by torchlight, and one of the men who attended it, inserting the point of his fork under the poor vagabond's belt, tossed him into the cart, bagpipes and all. The dog did all he could to defend his master, but in vain. The cart went thundering on, the men walking along by its side, examining the ways for new additions to their load. The piper, half awakened by the shock of his precipitation into the cart, and aroused still more by the joltings of the road, sat up, attempted in vain to rally his bewildered faculties, looked about him, wondering where he was, and then instinctively began to play. The men, astonished and terrified at such sounds from a cart loaded with the dead, fled in all directions, leaving the cart in the middle of the street alone.

• Abelaide Sector 15
• Brantori Garde Sector 14
• Larma Nucent Sector 13
• Spate Toran Sector 12

This document is Copyright © 2008 Carbelide Nelicanya. All rights reserved. Do not copy either electronically or otherwise without permission. Links and references to other Websites are not endorsements. Carbelide Nelicanya provides no guarantees or warrantees concerning other sites. Links are only provided as a courtesy and for entertainment purposes only.