Wearily had his life dragged on for many a day, and yet it was doomed to another drag. Before he had been two minutes in the water, this last-mentioned combination of cards, creepers, and hooks, brought him to the surface, having caught him by his bald pate, and he was carried ashore in a sculler. The nearest surgeon being called in, happened to differ from the Humane Society, and hung him up by the heels while he administered stimulants; but John had imbibed so little of the element, that even this treatment did not kill him. But his look was deadly, and he was so debilitated by the medical treatment, that to be restored was impossible; and the parish authorities of Saint —— , inspecting his sorry equipments, became alarmed lest he should die where he had no business, and put them to the expense of a funeral. He was asked where he lived, in order that he might also die there; and a cart being procured, under the New Poor Law Act, he was carted towards the dismal abode he had indicated. His road lay along the new street to the new bridge; and, about a hundred yards down, in a dark avenue on his left, he could not, though others might, see the once rich and respected tenement of his father, Roger Pooledoune, hosier and citizen of London.
The night was frosty and bleak: John's clothes were thin and wet. Had he been taken to an old woman instead of a medical theorist, and dried and cherished even by the commonest fire of the parish workhouse, he would have survived his "accident:" but the law was imperative; he must be moved to his own parish, and he was moved into the parish of Eternity,—the parish which holds the rich and the poor, and Heaven only knows how they are provided for. Before the cart reached the "Union," John Pooledoune was a corpse.
On the ensuing day but one, a coroner's inquest sat upon his body, and one or two of the jurors were men who had known him in his prosperity. They could hardly identify the meagre and mutilated remains; but, in tenderness to the officials, who had killed him by doing all for the best, they returned a verdict of "Found Drowned."
Not being conchologists, we shall not attempt to describe the shell in which it was pretended that John Pooledoune was buried. In that shell no muscle of his ever reposed; it held a few of the paving-stones of the adjacent lane, which, if John had been alive to submit to his galvanic battery, would have been demonstrated to be composed of bumble bees' sacchyrometers. About the same hour that the stones were interred with the solemn ritual of the church service by the chaplain, the body also furnished the subject of a lecture by the surgeon of the workhouse to the pupils in an adjoining hospital. The scull in particular was singularly formed, at least it was so declared by the phrenologists, who were allowed to claw it, and who clearly showed that the bumps (caused by the watermen's drags) were organs of philoprogenitiveness, amativeness, and destructiveness.
In due time a perfect skeleton of John Pooledoune was scraped and prepared, and placed in a glass case in the museum of the hospital.
And thus was fulfilled the Gipsy's prophecy. He was "by curing, slain;" he was "never lost on earth, alive or dead," for he was dragged from the river and preserved in the surgeons' hall; he was "found by numbers" of sensible coroner's inquest men! he is yet in his glass case a "bodiless corpse, the victim of improvement, for ever to improve" the students of anatomy. There was
"No hand to close his eyes; No eye to see his grave; No grave to give him rest!"
He is "dead, resembling Death," yet keeps "his place among the dead and the living." "His end has not been an ending," and every one who inspects the hospital collection may know that "he is and is not!"
In a moral magazine such as Bentley's Miscellany it is naturally expected that a useful and instructive inference should be drawn from every tale; and assuredly ours needs little to point it: "May we all be preserved from the fascinations of Gipsies!"