Northern Weekly Gazette. — 1908-07-18 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

MARGARET, E. SANGSTER. THE VAULTS OF .THE DEAD.  -7 one dead man is More terrifying than a thamsand corpses is a fact ehich must be placed to the credit of the amagin.ation. The one sppas to the fancy, as a tragic exception ; the -thousand suggest only the common lot, and the inevitable. In the presence of the one the fear of death gets held of the mind;• sucrrounded by the. other we foel the resignation of the fatalist. For example, brays a travelled! writer, I gazed the other day in a common show on !what the proprietor thereof described as a "petrified , prehistoric man." The "prehistoric ' was an effort of the .fancy; even the " petrified " may have:been.a mere Barnuraism. In any case, w4ithin that claleughty, there wss  on show the tragedy of one the one a black figure of a man, a oorpse like a. huge indiarubhor doll, said to have once been a cavedweller, and reputed to have been found sitting, as he sat in the show, wider the inexorna.ble drip of some cave spring, which preserved him to make a British holiday. There was much food for the fancy in the still figure, much of grim mockery in that long and silent watch ending in a penny show. A thou.saind suCh figures would have been gm, temple, at the least, not terrifying, for iihe fa.9p that the dead are unnums'erckl,Corla't /keith t•ifer. terrors and Makes us undenstand,w uripiges: nieant when he wrote—  • Who knows if living be not datikh, And death be living tlbere below P  . No doubt this feeling of safety, or, at least, of consolation, in n-umbens, conjoined with a dim to rob the "dark inn" of its grim tanners, accounts for the existenoe of suoh burying places, tif the phrase can be used in this connection, as (the eattaoontbs at Palermo. " Outs'. (313, the castaeontbs look like a station on the undergeound ; inside, they are a pleasant enough terminus of the dead. You peeves at the top of the stairs leading to the dhambers of death with a sense of solemnity, until you raise your eyes to the wails and see the *titres which adorn them. The Italians love to 'keep the last eeeting-plaoe of their deed beautiful, and eculptuxed =el& above the grave is never 60 pathetically artistic as in the Campos Santos of Italy. But these pictures—they are are lege on decency, so tinconocivably °rude as works of art, such a mockery of truth in design, that ome etande .a.ghast, before them and deE.oends to the etatacomts with no feeling of sot.emnity at all. Here ,in crude colones, one picture ahews a: men in a blue coat and yellow trousers; from his mouth there flows, as from a, pump, a ateady etre= of 'blood, which curves uneatterallyeie the iNiT and falls ift a baeha placed twenty feet from him: There another picture-but from one know all. - Poesibly (the pictures serve a purpose. They certainly make the entry into the vaults %stied* the dead stand in rows or hang on the walls in the habit as they live 4 a far from gru.etsetne experience. At the fink glimpse you dio eat realise that these serried ranks of men are the dead of three centuries. They are etill and Silent, butt the lowermost are all standing, and it is not until you raise your eyes and calkh. eight of the second and third tiers. 'of bedieta.: that you realiee you are in thel,presenoe.of some thousands of corpses, and the grim fans, eareSs • that the dead placed CRI the fieer.are tazini5at long rows of suicides, all of whonc have sottght death by hanging on the long walls of this lethal chamber. Some corpses arrest the eye more than others. Here stands a prieut, a little figure of a. man, dressed in his walking clothes. He died two hundred years ago, yet on his wizened tate there lurks a quizzical expression. He was evidently a humorist, and his face carries the suspicion of a joke still-born in his dying. The grave holdts that secret. His tongue you can still see in his mouth—dried, wizened, and leathery. lie laueis in death, and that tongue is a miateriattised voice from the grave. Up, there on the wall another corpse catches the eye. It is the corpse of a redeltairesl man with a tawny esseessehee-a, cynic by his look—dread in solemn bla.ok, rusty with years of expceone. He seems alive, until your eye travels down"to his tore. They are turned in with the limp IsetlpleseTICW, of death. Anal his Face? On a closer 'look see it is the face of a kippered man. Bath! Let us back to the sunlight and the sweetmeats of Palermo, the brigands on the hills, and the ' purple ehores and blue waters of the bay. Better (the unseen dead, the forgotten 'gra-ee' the clust to : the 'four winds than this mockery of t..h,e sanctity of the grave!  Ala a oorporatioai, French ragpickers enjoy au exceptionally good) repnta,tion. Rangy, &wording to tiliose in a position to epeo,k with authority in the matter, are members of the fraternity larw-hreakecrs, and their extrems3 homeiby is .proveAtial.