long time.




XXXIII.


FRENZY.

"Abstinence has its deadly exhaustions."

BALZAC (_Le Lys dans la Vallée_).

A few days before, the gravedigger, while digging up the whitened bones of
the ancient dead, had broken up with his pick-axe a mouldering coffin, and
a head rolled to his feet It was of later date, for the lower jaw was still
fastened to it and it had not the calcareous colour of bones buried long
ago. It was the more horrible.

The gravedigger threw it into his wheel-barrow with its neighbour's
shin-bones, and carried it to the common heap. It was this _thing_ that the
Curé of Althausen had coveted and stolen.

He had then placed it on his table and contemplated it in silence. The top
of the skull was polished and blunt, the front narrow, the bones small and
apparently not having attained their full development. It was therefore a
youthful head, the head of an adolescent cut down at the moment, when life
completely unfolds itself to hope; while the elliptical shape of the lower
maxillary, the small and similarly-shaped teeth, the slight separation of