Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden

day, entirely surpassing — for I was now come to my strength — the childish efforts upon the queenly butter-boat of E.....d’s debauched ruler. As the work of putrefaction proceeded — and the stench was awful, for S...y’s little leaven had per- vaded his whole lump — I rammed my arse-wedge frantically into his holes as they formed, as if in the insane hope of damming the damage of damned death’s fell flood. Indeed for a week or so I did more than this. The patient actually gained weight. But time tells on the strongest. In the second week I kept barely level : in the third he steadily lost ground : in the fourth he fell to pieces under me : in the fifth I sedulously and conscien- tiously buggered the pieces one by one : but it was no good. Steven Jimson was (in the immortal word of Poe) a nearly liquid mass of loathsome, of de- testable putrescence. Do not think for a moment that my affection was shaken by so slight a cir- cumstance ! But I assure you — nay ! I swear it to you upon this holy Relic ! (He produced a piece of the True Touchher — home, with the Magdalene’s clap-juice sticking to it still, and reverently kissed it) — That there was not one ounce of that body of love that could reasonably be firky-toodled any more. As long as anything that could be called Viscosity was inherent in the mass, I jounced it like a man. But this soon ceased : I reluctantly withdrew. Yet such was my love for my darling that I buggered a hole clean through his tomb- stone, and for six months I never left the hallowed spot. My spiritual superiors, however, soon put a spoke in my wheel. I should have been going on still, but they reminded me that I had a great ca- reer before me and that it was unworthy of a man — how much more of a Christian ! — To allow a personal grief, however severe, to blind one for ever alike to the beauty and the duty of life. In vain I replied that there was now no beauty for me [59]