Mr Benjamin Thorpe saw a link between the above legend, of which he gave a translation in his "Northern Mythology," and the Netherlandish proverb, "Let no one take a bone from the churchyard: the dead will torment him till he return it." Its general analogy with our Shroud-theft does not admit of doubt, though the proceedings of the expropriator of wax lights are more easily accounted for than are those of the Shroud-thief. Peter of Provence either stole the winding-sheet out of sheer mischief, or he took it to enable him to see sights not lawfully visible to mortal eyes. In any case a well-worn shroud could scarcely enrich the thief, while the wax used for ecclesiastical candles was, and is still, a distinctly marketable commodity. A stranger who goes into a church at Florence in the dusk of the evening, when a funeral ceremony is in the course of performance, is surprised to see men and boys dodging the footsteps of the brethren of the _Misericordia_, and stooping at every turn to the pavement; if he asks what is the object of their peculiar antics, he will hear that it is to collect The droppings of the wax to sell again. The industry is time-honoured in Italy. At Naples in the last century, the wax-men flourished exceedingly by reason of a usage described by Henry Swinburne. Candidates for holy orders who had not money enough to pay the fees, were in the habit of letting themselves out to attend funerals, so that they might be able to lay by the sum needful. But as they were often indisposed to fulfil the duties thus undertaken, they dressed up the city vagrants in their clothes and sent them to pray and sing instead of them. These latter made their account out of the transaction by having a friend near, who held a paper bag, into which they made the tapers waste plenteously. Other devices for improving the trade were common at that date in the Neapolitan kingdom. Once, when an archbishop was to be buried, and four hundred genuine friars were in attendance, suddenly a mad bull was let loose amongst them, whereupon they dropped their wax lights, and the thieves, who had laid the plot, picked them up. At another great funeral, each assistant was respectfully asked for his taper by an individual dressed like a sacristan; the tapers were then extinguished and quietly carried away--only afterwards it was discovered that the supposed sacristans belonged to a gang of thieves. The Shroud-theft is a product of the peculiar fascination exercised by the human skeleton upon the mediaeval fancy. The part played by the skeleton in the early art and early fiction of the Christian aera is one of large importance; the horrible, the grotesque, the pathetic, the humorous--all are grouped round the bare remnants of humanity. The skeleton, figuring as Death, still looks at you from the _facades_ of the village churches in the north of Italy and the Trentino--sometimes alone, sometimes with other stray