A great confusion and general dimness, not lessened any by two or three candles that were burning, pervaded the room, which was long and ran almost across the house. Half a dozen men were standing or moving about, and some were sitting or leaning upon coffins and biers, that covered all the floor, except where they occasionally left narrow passages between, like irregular aisles.
At the Professor’s entrance, the young man who had paid him so friendly a visit came up instantly, took hold of him by the arm, and turned him round, with the exclamation,—
“Here he is father! He is thin enough to be easily carried.”
The man denominated “father” by the young off-shoot of the establishment surveyed the Professor with a critical eye from head to foot, and, as there could be no better sample of physical spareness than he presented, said, laconically,—
“He’ll do.”
Then there was new confusion and bustling about, and two or three persons immediately seized the Professor, one by his hair, one by his feet, one by his arms. With a grim smile, he submitted, in perfect silence, to the operations of this dressing committee.
He saw himself—him, Gustav Kellermann, the philosopher!—blossom into brilliant colors, scarlet and blue and orange. He saw them clasp a girdle round his waist, to which they hung gilded toys and bells in all directions, until he was fairly covered over with trinkets of every device. He felt them encase his head—his learned, metaphysical head—in a cap that was adorned at the point and round the sides with innumerable swinging-dolls.
It had been daylight three or four hours when all the mysterious preparations, which had been done almost without speaking a single word, were finally completed, and every thing waited in readiness.
There, strangely conspicuous in that dismal room, with its dismal paraphernalia of death, was a brilliant, half-human, half-monkey-like creature, standing up on its hind legs, and flaming all over in gaudy colors. To this grotesque figure, the important actor, evidently the chief agent in the contract, a man of brief speech, came up and said, brusquely,—
“Now, you are dead, you know, and have nothing to do but be dead. You are not to be fidgeting, or stirring round, or peeping. When you are dead, you are dead, you know, and that is all.”