[Footnote 1: Still unpublished.] And listening to the lapping of the lake water I imagined a horrible colloquy in that vault. It all came into my mind, his dialogue and my dialogue. "Great God," I cried out, "something must be done to escape!" and my eyes were strained out on the lake, upon the island on which a Welshman had built a castle. I saw all the woods reaching down to the water's edge, and the woods I did not see I remembered; all the larch trees that grew on the hillsides came into my mind suddenly, and I thought what a splendid pyre might be built out of them. No trees had been cut for the last thirty years; I might live for another thirty. What splendid timber there would then be to build a pyre for me!--a pyre fifty feet high, saturated with scented oils, and me lying on the top of it with all my books (they would make a nice pillow for my head). The ancient heroes used to be laid with their arms beside them; their horses were slaughtered so that their spirits might be free to serve them in the aerial kingdoms they had gone to inhabit. My pyre should be built on the island facing me; its flames would be seen for miles and miles; the lake would be lighted up by it, and my body would become a sort of beacon-fire--the beacon of the pagan future awaiting old Ireland! Nor would the price of such a funeral be anything too excessive--a few hundred pounds perhaps, the price of a thousand larches and a few barrels of scented oil and the great feast: for while I was roasting, my mourners should eat roast meat and drink wine and wear gay dresses--the men as well as the women; and the gayest music would be played. The "Marriage of Figaro" and some Offenbach would be pleasing to my spirit, the ride of the Valkyrie would be an appropriate piece; but I am improvising a selection, and that is a thing that requires careful consideration. It would be a fine thing indeed if such a funeral--I hate the word--such a burning as this could be undertaken, and there is no reason why it should not be, unless the law interdicts public burnings of human bodies. And then my face clouded, and my soul too; I grew melancholy as the lake, as the southern mountains that rippled down the sky plaintive as an Irish melody, for the burning I had dreamed of so splendidly might never take place. I might have to fall back on the Public Crematorium in England--in Ireland there is no Crematorium; Ireland lingers in the belief in the resurrection of the body. "Before I decide," I said to myself, "what my own funeral shall be, I must find out what funeral liberties the modern law and Christian morality permit the citizen," and this I should not be able to discover until I returned to Dublin.