On the edge of the cemetery, on the east side, one sees the vaults of the Schismatic Greeks and those of the Protestants; they are separated from each other by a wall and again separated from the Catholic burials by another wall: sad dissents whose memory is perpetuated in the asylum where all quarrels end! Close by the Greek cemetery is another recess which protects a hole into which the still-born children are thrown to Limbo. Happy creatures! You have passed from the darkness of the maternal womb into everlasting darkness, without going through the light! Near this hole lie bones dug into the ground like roots, as each new grave is cleared: some, the older ones, are white and dry; others, more recently disinterred, are yellow and damp. Lizards run about those remains, glide in between the teeth, through the eyes and nostrils, come out through the mouth and ears of the skulls, their houses or nests. Three or four butterflies hovered over the mallow-flowers entwined with those bones, an image of the soul under that sky which resembles that under which the story of Psyche was invented. One skull still had a few hairs of the same shade as my own. Poor old gondolier! Did you at least steer your bark better than I have steered mine? A common grave remains open in the enclosure; they had just lowered a physician beside his old practice. His black coffin was covered with earth only at the top and its naked side awaited the side of another dead man to warm it Antonio had stuffed his wife in there, a fortnight ago, and it was the defunct doctor who had dispatched her: Antonio blessed a requiting and avenging God and bore his misfortune patiently. The coffins of private individuals are taken to that dismal dwelling-place in private gondolas, followed by a priest in another gondola. As the gondolas look like hearses, they suit the ceremony. A larger wherry, an "omnibus" of Cocytus, performs the service of the hospitals. Thus we find renewed the Egyptian burials and the fables of Charon and his ferry-boat. In the cemetery beside Venice stands an octagonal chapel dedicated to St. Christopher[115]. This saint, taking a child on his shoulders at the ford of a river, found it heavy; now the child was the Son of Mary, who holds the globe in His hand: the altar-picture represents this fair adventure. And I too have tried to carry a child-king, but I did not perceive that he was sleeping in his cradle with ten centuries: a load too heavy for my arms.