On the very next day I saw another sight which I think it probable no subsequent sight-seer in Vienna during all the half-century that has elapsed since that day has seen, or any will see in the future. It was a sight more monstrously contrasted with the scene I had yesterday witnessed than it could well enter into the human mind to conceive. It was a visit to the vast, long-disused catacombs under the cathedral church of St. Stephen. It was then about sixty years, as I was told--now more than a hundred--since these vaults were used as a place of sepulture. Here, as in many other well-known instances, the special peculiarities of soil and atmosphere prevent all the usual processes of decay, and the tens of thousands of corpses which have been deposited there--very many uncoffined and unshrouded during the visitation of the plague in 1713--have become to all intents and purposes mummies. They retain not only the form of human beings, but in many cases the features retain the ghastly expression which was their last when the breath of life left them. The countless forms, which never apparently from the day they were deposited there had been subjected to any sort of arrangement whatever, lay in monstrous confused heaps, mingled with shattered remains of coffins. The skin in every case had become of the consistency of very thick and tough leather, not quite so thick as that used for the sole of a stout shoe, but a good deal thicker than what is generally used for the upper leather even of the stoutest. There was not the slightest disagreeable odour in any part of the vaults. In the course of a long life I have seen very many strange sights, but never any one to match that in weird strangeness and impressive horror. If any sight on earth merits the degraded epithet “awful,” it must be that of those fearsome catacombs. What I have written here conveys but a very imperfect notion of all that we saw and felt during our progress through that terrible succession of vaults. But I abstain from chronicling the sights of this charnel-house for the same reason that I refrained from any attempt at describing the cloth of gold and the velvets and the silks and satins of the previous day. The detailed description of them may all be found in my mother’s book, in the fortieth chapter of which the reader so inclined may sup full of horrors to his heart’s content. I will content myself with testifying to the perfect accuracy and absence of exaggeration in the account there given.