“What’s this?” I said.
“This yer was a grave. The hogs have rooted it up. I tol’ the ol’ man he oughtn’t to turn the hogs in yer, but he said he’d no other place to put ’em, and he had to do it.”
I picked up a skull lying loose on the ground like a cobblestone. It was that of a young man; the teeth were all splendid and sound. How hideously they grinned at me! and the eye-sockets were filled with dirt. He was a tall man too, if that long thigh-bone was his.
Torn rags strewed the ground. The old ploughman picked up a fragment.
“This yer was a Union soldier. You may know by the blue cloth. But then that ain’t always a sign, for the Rebels got into our uniform when they had a chance, and got killed in it too.”
I turned the skull in my hand, half regretting that I could not carry it away with me. My first shuddering aversion to the grim relic was soon past. I felt a strange curiosity to know who had been its hapless owner, carrying it safely through twenty or more years of life to lose it here. Perhaps he was even then looking over my shoulder and smiling at it; no longer a perishable mortal, but a spirit imperishable, having no more use for such clumsy physical mechanism. The fancy came so suddenly, and was for an instant so vivid, that I looked up, half expecting that my eyes would meet the mild benignant eyes of the soldier. And these words came into my mind: “It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.”
Let him who has never thought seriously of life look at it through the vacant eye-sockets of a human skull. Then let him consider that he himself carries just such a thing around with him, useful here a little while, then to be cast aside.
“Every face, however full,
Padded round with flesh and fat,
Is but modelled on a skull.”