Brothers of Pity | Page 7

so horribly
frightened that, with my mask in one hand and the spade and the handle
of my bier in the other, I ran home as fast as my legs would carry me,

leaving the roses and the cross and the blue-velvet pall behind me in
the quarry.
Nurse was still out; and I crept back to bed without detection, where I
dreamed disturbedly of invisible gravediggers all through the night.
I did not feel quite so much afraid by daylight, but I was not a bit less
puzzled as to how Cock Robin had been moved from the stony place to
the soft earth, and who dug his grave. I could not ask Nurse about it, for
I should have had to tell her I had been out, and I could not have trusted
Mrs. Jones either; but Godfather Gilpin never tells tales of me, and he
knows everything, so I went to him.
The more I thought of it the more I saw that the only way was to tell
him everything; for if you only tell parts of things you sometimes find
yourself telling lies before you know where you are. So I put on my
cloak and my mask, and took the shovel and bier into the study, and sat
down on the little foot-stool I always wait on when Godfather Gilpin is
in the middle of reading, and keeps his head down to show that he does
not want to be disturbed.
When he shut up his book and looked at me he burst out laughing. I
meant to have asked him why, but I was so busy afterwards I forgot. I
suppose it was the nose, for it had got rather broken when I fell down
as I was burying the old drake that Neptune killed.
But he was very kind to me, and I told him all about my being a
Brother of Pity, and how I had wanted to bury a robin, and how I had
found one, and how he had frightened me by burying himself.
"Some other Brother of Pity must have found him," said my godfather,
still laughing. "And he must have got Jack the Giant-killer's cloak of
darkness for his dress, so that you did not see him."
"There was nobody there," I earnestly answered, shaking my mask as I
thought of the still, lonely moonlight. "Nothing but two beetles, and I
said if they would take care of him they might be Brothers of Pity."

"They took you at your word, mio fratello. Take off your mask, which a
little distracts me, and I will tell you who buried Cock Robin."
I knew when Godfather Gilpin was really telling me things--without
thinking of something else, I mean,--and I listened with all my ears.
"The beetles whom you very properly admitted into your brotherhood,"
said my godfather, "were burying beetles, or sexton beetles,[A] as they
are sometimes called. They bury animals of all sizes in a surprisingly
short space of time. If two of them cannot conduct the funeral, they
summon others. They carry the bodies, if necessary, to suitable ground.
With their flat heads (for the sexton beetle does not carry a shovel as
you do) they dig trench below trench all round the body they are
committing to the earth, after which they creep under it and pull it
down, and then shovel away once more, and so on till it is deep enough
in, and then they push the earth over it and tread it and pat it neatly
down."
"Then was it the beetles who were burying the robin-redbreast?" I
gasped.
"I suspect so," said Godfather Gilpin. "But we will go and see."
He actually knocked a book down in his hurry to get his hat, and when
I helped him to pick it up, and said, "Why, godfather, you're as bad as I
was about Taylor's Sermons," he said, "I am an old fool, my dear. I
used to be very fond of insects before I settled down to the work I'm at
now, and it quite excites me to go out into the fields again."
I never had a nicer walk, for he showed me lots of things I had never
noticed, before we got to the quarry field; and then I took him straight
to the place where the bit of soft earth was, and there was nothing to be
seen, and the earth was quite smooth and tidy. But when he poked with
his stick the ground was very soft, and after he had poked a little we
saw some nut-brown feathers, and we knew it was Robin's grave.
And I said, "Don't poke any more, please. I wanted to bury him with
rose-leaves, but the beetles were dressed in black, and