I was still absorbed in watching this phenomenon of the disunion of body and bones with complete unconcern, when my nimble imagination suddenly darted into a diverse channel of speculation. From my present medical or scientific abstraction I found myself sharply recalling Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes in the Campo Santo of Pisa, wherein are depicted for the edification of the careless Christian the three stages of human decay after death. It was a morbid but persistent theme, and not only did I fail to exclude it from my unwilling brain, but other paintings and representations equally or even more gruesome, such as the decadent artists of the days of the later Medicean princes loved to depict, arose to my prolific fancy. I recalled Zumbo's horrible wax figures, exhibiting at once the loathsome corruption of the flesh and the exquisite torments of hell-fire, wherewith a certain Tuscan Grand Duchess was wont to stimulate to self-denying piety a mind engrossed by the pomps of rank and riches. With these unwelcome but spontaneous memories there now supervened a physical sensation that was most repugnant. The room itself, despite the fresh sea breeze and the cheerful sunshine, grew close and oppressive; there arose an intolerable smell of putrefaction, the unmistakable bouquet of the charnel-house; and this insidious encroaching odour filled my whole being with a sense of disgust that I found impossible to expel. Meanwhile in the mirror itself the process of disintegration was advancing apace. At first I sought to ignore the changing tints of the rotting flesh and the entry of the worms and other vermin of the abandoned dead, and haply I might have succeeded in my mental struggle, had it not been for the increasing and well-nigh overpowering stench of the tomb which seemed to gather and enfold me in its dank miasmatic embrace. The pure light of the sunlit room had yielded to a dingy crepuscule, in which alone was plainly visible that accursed rectangle of glass with its surface churning out horror upon horror not only for the retina but also for the nostrils. And in the midst of this dissolving creeping mutating picture of human corruption there still shone out intact the feverish unfaded eyes that were stretched wide with a blank despair. I searched and searched with questioning dilated pupils their awful counterparts in the cruel glass, as though I were striving to force them to surrender up their appalling secret. At length I seemed to obtain the solution I sought yet dreaded to receive: it was Finality. What I saw being enacted before me by proxy was my own fate, my utter blotting out from the page of life, and not a mere stage, painful and ugly doubtless, but nevertheless only an intermediate stage to another phase of existence, as I had hitherto devoutly held. At last I realised that my own appointed portion was but this mean trilogy: the grave, corruption and nothingness; for the