exchange in their pockets, or in belts. Some of these documents,
carefully unwrinkled and dried, were little less fresh in
appearance that day, than the present page will be under ordinary
circumstances, after having been opened three or four times.
In that lonely place, it had not been easy to obtain even such
common commodities in towns, as ordinary disinfectants. Pitch had
been burnt in the church, as the readiest thing at hand, and the
frying-pan in which it had bubbled over a brazier of coals was
still there, with its ashes. Hard by the Communion-Table, were
some boots that had been taken off the drowned and preserved – a
gold-digger’s boot, cut down the leg for its removal – a troddendown
man’s ankle-boot with a buff cloth top – and others – soaked
and sandy, weedy and salt.
From the church, we passed out into the churchyard. Here, there
lay, at that time, one hundred and forty-five bodies, that had come
ashore from the wreck. He had buried them, when not identified, in
graves containing four each. He had numbered each body in a
register describing it, and had placed a corresponding number on
each coffin, and over each grave. Identified bodies he had buried
singly, in private graves, in another part of the church-yard.
Several bodies had been exhumed from the graves of four, as
relatives had come from a distance and seen his register; and, when
recognised, these have been reburied in private graves, so that the
mourners might erect separate headstones over the remains. In all
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
such cases he had performed the funeral service a second time, and
the ladies of his house had attended. There had been no offence in
the poor ashes when they were brought again to the light of day;
the beneficent Earth had already absorbed it. The drowned were
buried in their clothes. To supply the great sudden demand for
coffins, he had got all the neighbouring people handy at tools, to
work the livelong day, and Sunday likewise. The coffins were
neatly formed; – I had seen two, waiting for occupants, under the
lee of the ruined walls of a stone hut on the beach, within call of
the tent where the Christmas Feast was held. Similarly, one of the
graves for four was lying open and ready, here, in the churchyard.
So much of the scanty space was already devoted to the wrecked
people, that the villagers had begun to express uneasy doubts
whether they themselves could lie in their own ground, with their
forefathers and descendants, by-and-by. The churchyard being but a
step from the clergyman’s dwelling-house, we crossed to the latter;
the white surplice was hanging up near the door ready to be put on
at any time, for a funeral service.
The cheerful earnestness of this good Christian minister was as
consolatory, as the circumstances out of which it shone were sad.
I never have seen anything more delightfully genuine than the calm
dismissal by himself and his household of all they had undergone,
as a simple duty that was quietly done and ended. In speaking of
it, they spoke of it with great compassion for the bereaved; but
laid no stress upon their own hard share in those weary weeks,
except as it had attached many people to them as friends, and
elicited many touching expressions of gratitude. This clergyman’s
brother – himself the clergyman of two adjoining parishes, who had
buried thirty-four of the bodies in his own churchyard, and who had
done to them all that his brother had done as to the larger number
– must be understood as included in the family. He was there, with
his neatly arranged papers, and made no more account of his trouble
than anybody else did. Down to yesterday’s post outward, my
clergyman alone had written one thousand and seventy-five letters
to relatives and friends of the lost people. In the absence of
self-assertion, it was only through my now and then delicately
putting a question as the occasion arose, that I became informed of
these things. It was only when I had remarked again and again, in