At length an occasion arose which threw the pair once more into a closer union. Mr.K was again short of subjects;pupils were eager, and it was a part of this teacher's pretensions to be always well supplied.At the same time there came the news of a burial in the rustic graveyard of Glencorse.Time has little changed the place in question.It stood then, as now, upon a cross road, out of call of human habitations, and buried fathom deep in the foliage of six cedar trees.The cries of the sheep upon the neighbouring hills, the streamlets upon either hand, one loudly singing among pebbles, the other dripping furtively from pond to pond, the stir of the wind in mountainous old flowering chestnuts, and once in seven days the voice of the bell and the old tunes of the precentor, were the only sounds that disturbed the silence around the rural church.The Resurrection Man—to use a byname of the period—was not to be deterred by any of the sanctities of customary piety.It was part of his trade to despise and desecrate the scrolls and trumpets of old tombs, the paths worn by the feet of worshippers and mourners, and the offerings and the inscriptions of bereaved affection.To rustic neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious, and where some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire society of a parish, the body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was attracted by the ease and safety of the task.To bodies that had been laid in earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and mattock.The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless byways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of gaping boys.
Somewhat as two vultures may swoop upon a dying lamb, Fettes and Macfarlane were to be let loose upon a grave in that green and quiet resting-place. The wife of a farmer, a woman who had lived for sixty years, and been known for nothing but good butter and a godly conversation, was to be rooted from her grave at midnight and carried, dead and naked, to that far-away city that she had always honoured with her Sunday's best;the place beside her family was to be empty till the crack of doom;her innocent and almost venerable members to be exposed to that last curiosity of the anatomist.