Brothers of Pity | Page 5

was not the dressing-up that pleased me day after day, it was the
chance of finding dead bodies with no friends to bury them. Going out
is quite a new thing when you have something to look for; and
Godfather Gilpin says he felt just the same in the days when he used to
collect insects.
I found a good many corpses of one sort and another: birds and mice
and frogs and beetles, and sometimes bigger bodies--such as kittens
and dogs. The stand of my old wooden horse made a capital thing to
drag them on, for all the wheels were there, and I had a piece of blue
cotton-velvet to put on the top, but the day I found a dead mole I did
not cover him. I put him outside, and he looked like black velvet lying
on blue velvet. It seemed quite a pity to put him into the dirty ground,
with such a lovely coat.
One day I was coming back from burying a mouse, and I saw a "flying
watchman" beetle lying quite stiff and dead, as I thought, with his legs
stretched out, and no friends; so I put him on the bier at once, and put
the blue velvet over him, and drew him to the place where the mouse's
grave was. When I took the pall off and felt him, and turned him over
and over, he was still quite rigid, so I felt sure he was dead, and began
to dig his grave; but when I had finished and went back to the bier, the
flying watchman was just creeping over the wheel. He had only
pretended to be dead, and had given me all that trouble for nothing.
When first I became a Brother of Pity, I thought I would have a
graveyard to bury all the creatures in, but afterwards I changed my
mind and settled to bury them all near wherever I found them. But I got
some bits of white wood, and fastened them across each other with bits
of wire, and so marked every grave.

At last there were lots of them dotted about the fields and woods I
knew. I remembered to whom most of them belonged, and even if I had
forgotten, it made a very good game, to pretend to be a stranger in the
neighbourhood, and then pretend to be somebody else, talking to
myself, and saying, "Wherever you see those little graves some poor
creature has been buried by the Brothers of Pity."
I did not like to read the burial service, for fear it should not be quite
right (especially for frogs; there were so many of them in summer, and
they were so horrid-looking, I used to bury several together, and
pretend it was the time of the plague); but I did not like not having any
service at all. So when I put on my cloak and mask, and took my spade
and the bier, I said, "Brothers, let us prepare to perform this work of
mercy," which is the first thing the real Fratelli della Misericordia say
when they are going out. And when I buried the body I said, "Go in
peace," which is the last thing that they say. Godfather Gilpin told me,
and I learnt it by heart.
I enjoyed it very much. There were graves of beasts and birds who had
died without friends in the hedges and the soft parts of the fields in
almost all our walks. I never showed them to Nurse, but I often
wondered that she did not notice them. I always touched my hat when I
passed them, and sometimes it was very difficult to do so without her
seeing me, but it made me quite uncomfortable if I passed a grave
without. When I could not find any bodies I amused myself with
making wreaths to hang over particularly nice poor beasts, such as a
bullfinch or a kitten.
I had been a Brother of Pity for several months, when a very curious
thing happened.
One summer evening I went by myself after tea into a steep little field
at the back of our house, with an old stone-quarry at the top, on the
ledges of which, where the earth had settled, I used to play at making
gardens. And there, lying on a bit of very stony ground, half on the
stones and half on the grass, was a dead robin-redbreast. I love robins
very much, and it was not because I wanted one to die, but because I
thought that if one did die, I should so like to bury him, that I had

wished to find a dead robin ever since I became a Brother of Pity. It
was rather late, but it wanted