The
brotherhood is six hundred years old, and still exists. The men who
belong to it receive no pay, and they equally reject the reward of
public praise, for they work with covered faces, and are not known even
to each other. Rich men and poor men, noble men and working men, men of
letters and the ignorant, all belong to it, and each takes his turn when
it comes round to nurse the sick, carry the dying to hospital, and bury
the dead.'
"Is that a dead man under the blue coverlet?" I asked with awe.
"I suppose so," said Godfather Gilpin.
"But why don't his friends go to the funeral?" I inquired.
"He has no friends to follow him," said my godfather. "That is why he is
being buried by the Brothers of Pity."
Long after Godfather Gilpin had told me all that he could tell me of the
_Fratelli della Misericordia_--long after I had put the congregation
(including the _Religious Orders_ and Taylor's _Sermons_) back into the
shelf to which they belonged--the masked faces and solemn garb of the
men in the picture haunted me.
I have changed my mind a great many times, since I can remember, about
what I will be when I am grown up. Sometimes I have thought I should
like to be an officer and die in battle; sometimes I settled to be a
clergyman and preach splendid sermons to enormous congregations; once I
quite decided to be a head fireman and wear a brass helmet, and be
whirled down lighted streets at night, every one making way for me, on
errands of life and death.
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