Many of our gentle countrymen—fellow-metropolitans—who once a year wriggle out their souls from the slit of their tills to give the immortal essence sea air, make a pilgrimage to Reculvers. This Golgotha, we have noted it, has to them especial attractions. Many are the mortal relics borne away to decorate a London chimney-piece. Many a skeleton gives up its rib, its ulna, two or three odd vertebræ, or some such gimcrack to the London visitor, for a London ornament. Present the same man with a bone from a London hospital, and he would hold the act abominable, irreligiously presumptuous. But time has “silvered o’er” the bone from Reculvers; has cleansed it from the taint of mortality; has merged the loathsomeness in the curiosity; for time turns even the worst of horrors to the broadest of jests. We have now Guy Fawkes about to blow Lords and Commons into eternity—and now Guy Fawkes masked for a pantomime.
One day, wandering near this open graveyard, we met a boy, carrying away, with exulting looks, a skull in very perfect preservation. He was a London boy, and looked rich indeed with his treasure.
“What have you there?” we asked.
“A man’s head—a skull,” was the answer.
“And what can you possibly do with a skull?”
“Take it to London.”
“And when you have it in London, what then will you do with it?”
“I know.”
“No doubt. But what will you do with it?”
And to this thrice-repeated question the boy three times answered, “I know.”