“This is Thanksgiving day,” said he. “And we don't know much about praying, but I guess we all have something in our hearts that does just as well.”
“Damme, yes,” said Gillispie, again, as he pensively cocked and uncocked his revolver.
A Resuscitation
AFTER being dead twenty years, he walked out into the sunshine.
It was as if the bones of a bleached skeleton should join themselves on some forgotten plain, and look about them for the vanished flesh.
To be dead it is not necessary to be in the grave. There are places where the worms creep about the heart instead of the body.
The penitentiary is one of these. David Culross had been in the penitentiary twenty years. Now, with that worm-eaten heart, he came out into liberty and looked about him for the habiliments with which he had formerly clothed himself,—for hope, self-respect, courage, pugnacity, and industry.
But they had vanished and left no trace, like the flesh of the dead men on the plains, and so, morally unapparelled, in the hideous skeleton of his manhood, he walked on down the street under the mid-June sunshine.
You can understand, can you not, how a skeleton might wish to get back into its comfortable grave? David Culross had not walked two blocks before he was seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to beg to be shielded once more in that safe and shameful retreat from which he had just been released. A horrible perception of the largeness of the world swept over him. Space and eternity could seem no larger to the usual man than earth—that snug and insignificant planet—looked to David Culross.