grandfather, who had been a priest, to take an oath that never again,
Heaven helping me, would I earn an honest penny.

How long I traveled I know not, but I came at last to a great city by
the sea, where I set up as a physician. The name of that place I do not
now remember, for such were my activity and renown in my new profession
that the Aldermen, moved by pressure of public opinion, altered it, and
thenceforth the place was known as the City of the Gone Away. It is
needless to say that I had no knowledge of medicine, but by securing the
service of an eminent forger I obtained a diploma purporting to have
been granted by the Royal Quackery of Charlatanic Empiricism at Hoodos,
which, framed in immortelles and suspended by a bit of _crepe_ to a
willow in front of my office, attracted the ailing in great numbers. In
connection with my dispensary I conducted one of the largest undertaking
establishments ever known, and as soon as my means permitted, purchased
a wide tract of land and made it into a cemetery. I owned also some very
profitable marble works on one side of the gateway to the cemetery, and
on the other an extensive flower garden. My Mourner's Emporium was
patronized by the beauty, fashion and sorrow of the city. In short, I
was in a very prosperous way of business, and within a year was able to
send for my parents and establish my old father very comfortably as a
receiver of stolen goods--an act which I confess was saved from the
reproach of filial gratitude only by my exaction of all the profits.

But the vicissitudes of fortune are avoidable only by practice of the
sternest indigence: human foresight cannot provide against the envy of
the gods and the tireless machinations of Fate. The widening circle of
prosperity grows weaker as it spreads until the antagonistic forces
which it has pushed back are made powerful by compression to resist and
finally overwhelm. So great grew the renown of my skill in medicine that
patients were brought to me from all the four quarters of the globe.
Burdensome invalids whose tardiness in dying was a perpetual grief to
their friends; wealthy testators whose legatees were desirous to come by
their own; superfluous children of penitent parents and dependent
parents of frugal children; wives of husbands ambitious to remarry and
husbands of wives without standing in the courts of divorce--these and
all conceivable classes of the surplus population were conducted to my
dispensary in the City of the Gone Away. They came in incalculable
multitudes.

Government agents brought me caravans of orphans, paupers, lunatics and
all who had become a public charge. My skill in curing orphanism and
pauperism was particularly acknowledged by a grateful parliament.

Naturally, all this promoted the public prosperity, for although I got
the greater part of the money that strangers expended in the city, the
rest went into the channels of trade, and I was myself a liberal
investor, purchaser and employer, and a patron of the arts and sciences.
The City of the Gone Away grew so rapidly that in a few years it had
inclosed my cemetery, despite its own constant growth. In that fact lay
the lion that rent me.

The Aldermen declared my cemetery a public evil and decided to take it
from me, remove the bodies to another place and make a park of it. I was
to be paid for it and could easily bribe the appraisers to fix a high
price, but for a reason which will appear the decision gave me little
joy. It was in vain that I protested against the sacrilege of disturbing
the holy dead, although this was a powerful appeal, for in that land the
dead are held in religious veneration. Temples are built in their honor
and a separate priesthood maintained at the public expense, whose only
duty is performance of memorial services of the most solemn and touching
kind. On four days in the year there is a Festival of the Good, as it is
called, when all the people lay by their work or business and, headed by
the priests, march in procession through the cemeteries, adorning the
graves and praying in the temples. However bad a man's life may be, it
is believed that when dead he enters into a state of eternal and
inexpressible happiness. To signify a doubt of this is an offense
punishable by death. To deny burial to the dead, or to exhume a buried
body, except under sanction of law by special dispensation and with
solemn ceremony, is a crime having no stated penalty because no one has
ever had the hardihood to commit it.

All these considerations were in my favor, yet so well assured were the
people and their civic officers that my cemetery was injurious to the
public health that it was condemned and appraised, and with terror in my
heart I received three times its value and began to settle up my affairs
with all speed.

A week later was the day appointed for the formal inauguration of the
ceremony of removing the bodies. The day was fine and the entire
population of the city and surrounding country was present at the
imposing religious rites. These were directed by the mortuary priesthood
in full canonicals. There was propitiatory sacrifice in the Temples of
the Once, followed by a processional pageant of great splendor, ending
at the cemetery. The Great Mayor in his robe of state led the
procession. He was armed with a golden spade and followed by one hundred
male and female singers, clad all in white and chanting the Hymn to the
Gone Away. Behind these came the minor priesthood of the temples, all
the civic authorities, habited in their official apparel, each carrying
a living pig as an offering to the gods of the dead. Of the many
divisions of the line, the last was formed by the populace, with
uncovered heads, sifting dust into their hair in token of humility. In
front of the mortuary chapel in the midst of the necropolis, the Supreme
Priest stood in gorgeous vestments, supported on each hand by a line of
bishops and other high dignitaries of his prelacy, all frowning with the
utmost austerity. As the Great Mayor paused in the Presence, the minor
clergy, the civic authorities, the choir and populace closed in and
encompassed the spot. The Great Mayor, laying his golden spade at the
feet of the Supreme Priest, knelt in silence.