Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

thawed. It was a mistake (my friend was glad to tell me, on the

way) to suppose that the peasantry had shown any superstitious

avoidance of the drowned; on the whole, they had done very well,

and had assisted readily. Ten shillings had been paid for the

bringing of each body up to the church, but the way was steep, and

a horse and cart (in which it was wrapped in a sheet) were

necessary, and three or four men, and, all things considered, it

was not a great price. The people were none the richer for the

wreck, for it was the season of the herring-shoal – and who could

cast nets for fish, and find dead men and women in the draught?

He had the church keys in his hand, and opened the churchyard gate,

and opened the church door; and we went in.

It is a little church of great antiquity; there is reason to

believe that some church has occupied the spot, these thousand

years or more. The pulpit was gone, and other things usually

belonging to the church were gone, owing to its living congregation

having deserted it for the neighbouring school-room, and yielded it

up to the dead. The very Commandments had been shouldered out of

their places, in the bringing in of the dead; the black wooden

tables on which they were painted, were askew, and on the stone

pavement below them, and on the stone pavement all over the church,

were the marks and stains where the drowned had been laid down.

The eye, with little or no aid from the imagination, could yet see

how the bodies had been turned, and where the head had been and

where the feet. Some faded traces of the wreck of the Australian

ship may be discernible on the stone pavement of this little

church, hundreds of years hence, when the digging for gold in

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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

Australia shall have long and long ceased out of the land.

Forty-four shipwrecked men and women lay here at one time, awaiting

burial. Here, with weeping and wailing in every room of his house,

my companion worked alone for hours, solemnly surrounded by eyes

that could not see him, and by lips that could not speak to him,

patiently examining the tattered clothing, cutting off buttons,

hair, marks from linen, anything that might lead to subsequent

identification, studying faces, looking for a scar, a bent finger,

a crooked toe, comparing letters sent to him with the ruin about

him. ‘My dearest brother had bright grey eyes and a pleasant

smile,’ one sister wrote. O poor sister! well for you to be far

from here, and keep that as your last remembrance of him!

The ladies of the clergyman’s family, his wife and two sisters-inlaw,

came in among the bodies often. It grew to be the business of

their lives to do so. Any new arrival of a bereaved woman would

stimulate their pity to compare the description brought, with the

dread realities. Sometimes, they would go back able to say, ‘I

have found him,’ or, ‘I think she lies there.’ Perhaps, the

mourner, unable to bear the sight of all that lay in the church,

would be led in blindfold. Conducted to the spot with many

compassionate words, and encouraged to look, she would say, with a

piercing cry, ‘This is my boy!’ and drop insensible on the

insensible figure.

He soon observed that in some cases of women, the identification of

persons, though complete, was quite at variance with the marks upon

the linen; this led him to notice that even the marks upon the

linen were sometimes inconsistent with one another; and thus he

came to understand that they had dressed in great haste and

agitation, and that their clothes had become mixed together. The

identification of men by their dress, was rendered extremely

difficult, in consequence of a large proportion of them being

dressed alike – in clothes of one kind, that is to say, supplied by

slopsellers and outfitters, and not made by single garments but by

hundreds. Many of the men were bringing over parrots, and had

receipts upon them for the price of the birds; others had bills of

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