no!  Just as I was about to begin, the supervisors, they shut down on it; they said the county didn’t care nothin’ about people that had been dead for six hundred years, and they wouldn’t pay me a cent.  Just as if six thousand years was anything in the eye of the law, when maybe a man’s been stabbed, or something, and when I’m under oath to tend to him!  But it’s just my luck.  Everything appears to be agin me, ’specially if there’s money in it.”

“You do seem rather unfortunate.”

“Now, there’s some countries where they frequently have earthquakes which rattle down the houses and mash people, and volcanoes which burst out and set hundreds of ’em afire, and hurricanes which blow ’em into Hereafter.  A coroner can have some comfort in such a place as that.  He can live honest and respectable.  Just think of settin’ on four or five hundred bodies killed with an earthquake!  It makes my mouth water.  But nothin’ of that sort ever happens in this jackass kind of a land.  Things go along just ’sif they were asleep.  We’ve got six saw-mills ’round this town, but nobody ever gets tangled in the machinery and sawed in half.  We’ve got a gunpowder-factory out beyond the turnpike, but will that ever go up?  It wouldn’t if you was to toss a red-hot stove in among the powder—­leastways, not while I’m coroner.  There’s a river down there, but nobody ever drowns in it where I can have a hitch at him; and if there’s a freshet, everybody at once gets out of reach.  If there’s a fire, all the inmates get away safe, and no fireman ever falls off a ladder or stands where a wall might flatten him out.  No, sir; I don’t have a fair show.  There was that riot out at the foundry.  In any other place three or four men would have been killed, and there’d a been fatness for the coroner; but of course, bein’ in my county, nothin’ occurred exceptin’ Sam Dixon got kicked in the ribs and had part of his ear bitten off.  A man can’t make an honest livin’ under sech circumstances as them; he can’t, really.”

“It does appear difficult.”

“I did think maybe I might get the supervisors to let me go out to the cemetery and set on the folks that are buried there, so’s I could overhaul ’em and kinder revise the verdicts that’ve been rendered on ’em.  I’d a done it for half price; but those fellows have got such queer ideas of economy that they wouldn’t listen to it; said the town couldn’t go to any fresh expense while it was buildin’ water-works.  And I wanted to put the new school-house out yer by the railroad or down by the river, so’s some of the children’d now and then get run over or fall in; but the parents were ’posed to it for selfish reasons, and so I got shoved out of that chance.  Yes, sir, it’s rough on me; and I tell you that if there are not more sudden deaths in this county the law’s got to give me a salary, or I’m goin’ to perish by starvation.  Not that I’d mind that much for myself, but it cuts me up to think that as soon as I stepped out the next coroner’d begin right off to earn a livin’ out of me.”