Would I like to go to the wake held
that night at the next house, three miles away? After supper, horses
were saddled up and away we galloped. Quite a number had already
gathered there. We found the dead man lying on a couple of
sheepskins, in the centre of a mud-walled and mud-floored room. "No
useless coffin enclosed his breast," nor was he wound in either sheet
or shroud. There he lay, fully attired, even to his shoes. Four
tallow candles lighted up the gloom, and these were placed at his
head and feet. His clammy hands were reverently folded over his
breast, whilst entwined in his fingers was a bronze cross and rosary,
that St. Peter, seeing his devotion, might, without questioning,
admit him to a better world. The scene was weird beyond description.
Outside, the wind moaned a sad dirge; great bats and black moths, the
size of birds, flitted about in the midnight darkness. These, ever
and anon, made their way inside and extinguished the candles, which
flickered and dripped as they fitfully shone on the shrunken features
of the corpse. He had been a reprobate and an assassin, but, luckily
for him, a pious woman, not wishing to see him die "in his sins," had
sprinkled Holy Water on him. The said "Elixir of Life" had been
brought eighty miles, and was kept in her house to use only in
extreme cases.
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