He led them by snaky windings and corkscrew paths to the churchyard; but suddenly his eyes grew moist, as one's do when passing through a thick mist, when he thought of the mother's grave with the flowers on it, and on Lenette who gave no sign of ever becoming one. He strove to expel the sadness from his heart by philosophic speeches. He said human beings and watches stop while they are being wound up for a new long day; and that he believed that those dark intervals of sleep and death, which break up and divide our existence into segments, prevent any one particular idea from getting to glare too brightly, and our never-cooling desires from searing us wholly--and oven our ideas from interflowing into confusion--just as the planetary systems are separated by gloomy wastes of space, and the solar systems by yet greater gulfs of darkness. That the human spirit could never take in and contain the endless stream of knowledge which flows throughout eternity, but that it sips it by portions at a time, with intervals between: the eternal day would blind our souls were it not broken into separate days by midsummer nights (which we call, now sleep, now death), framing its noons in a border of mornings and evenings. Lenette was frightened, and would have liked to run away behind the wall and not go into the churchyard; however, she had to go in. Firmian, holding her closely to him, took a roundabout path to the place where the wreath was. He closed the little clattering metal gates which guarded the pious verses and the brief life-careers. They came to the better-class graves nearest the church, which lay round that fortress like a kind of moat. Here there were nothing but upright monuments standing over the quiet mummies below, while further on were mere trapdoors let down upon recumbent human beings. A bony head, which was sleeping in the open air, Firmian set a-rolling, and--heedless of Lenette's oft-renewed entreaties to him not to make himself "unclean"--he took up in both his hands this last capsule case of a spirit of many dwelling places, and, looking into the empty window-openings of the ruined pleasure-house, said, "They ought to get up into the pulpit inside there at midnight, and put this scalped mask of our Personality down upon the desk in place of the Bible and the hourglass, and preach upon it as a text to the _other_ heads sitting there still packed in their skins. They should have _my_ head, if they liked to skin it after my decease, and hook it up in the church like a herring's, upon a string, by way of angel at the font--so that the silly souls might for once in their lives look _upward_ and then _downward_--for we hang and hover between heaven and the grave. The hazel-nut worm is still in _our_ heads, Herr Schulrath, but it has gone through its transformation and flown out from this one, for there are two holes in it and a kernel of dust."[51]