But it was not the dressing-up that pleased me day after day, it was the
chance of finding dead bodies with no friends to bury them. Going out is
quite a new thing when you have something to look for; and Godfather
Gilpin says he felt just the same in the days when he used to collect
insects.

I found a good many corpses of one sort and another: birds and mice and
frogs and beetles, and sometimes bigger bodies--such as kittens and
dogs. The stand of my old wooden horse made a capital thing to drag them
on, for all the wheels were there, and I had a piece of blue
cotton-velvet to put on the top, but the day I found a dead mole I did
not cover him. I put him outside, and he looked like black velvet lying
on blue velvet. It seemed quite a pity to put him into the dirty ground,
with such a lovely coat.

One day I was coming back from burying a mouse, and I saw a "flying
watchman" beetle lying quite stiff and dead, as I thought, with his legs
stretched out, and no friends; so I put him on the bier at once, and put
the blue velvet over him, and drew him to the place where the mouse's
grave was. When I took the pall off and felt him, and turned him over
and over, he was still quite rigid, so I felt sure he was dead, and
began to dig his grave; but when I had finished and went back to the
bier, the flying watchman was just creeping over the wheel. He had only
pretended to be dead, and had given me all that trouble for nothing.

When first I became a Brother of Pity, I thought I would have a
graveyard to bury all the creatures in, but afterwards I changed my mind
and settled to bury them all near wherever I found them. But I got some
bits of white wood, and fastened them across each other with bits of
wire, and so marked every grave.