Stella was buried by torchlight, at midnight, on the Thirtieth day of January, Seventeen Hundred Twenty-eight.  Swift was sick at the time, and wrote in his journal:  “This is the night of her funeral, and I am removed to another apartment that I may not see the light in the church which is just over against my window.”  But in his imagination he saw the gleaming torches as their dull light shone through the colored windows, and he said, “They will soon do as much for me.”

But seventeen years came crawling by before the torches flared, smoked and gleamed as the mourners chanted a requiem, and the clods fell on the coffin, and their echoes intermingled with the solemn voice of the priest as he said, “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.”

In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-five, the graves were opened and casts taken of the skulls.  The top of Swift’s skull had been sawed off at the autopsy, and a bottle in which was a parchment setting forth the facts was inserted in the head that had conceived “Gulliver’s Travels.”

I examined the casts.  The woman’s head is square and shapely.  Swift’s head is a refutation of phrenology, being small, sloping and ordinary.

The bones of Swift and Stella were placed in one coffin, and now rest under three feet of concrete, beneath the floor of Saint Patrick’s.

So sleep the lovers joined in death.

WALT WHITMAN

All seems beautiful to me. 
I can repeat over to men and women, You have done
such good to me I would do the same to you,
I will recruit for myself and you as I go. 
I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,
I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them.
—­Song of the Open Road

[Illustration:  Walt Whitman]

Max Nordau wrote a book—­wrote it with his tongue in his cheek, a dash of vitriol in the ink, and with a pen that scratched.

And the first critic who seemed to place a just estimate on the work was Mr. Zangwill (he who has no Christian name).  Mr. Zangwill made an attempt to swear out a “writ de lunatico inquirendo” against his Jewish brother, on the ground that the first symptom of insanity is often the delusion that others are insane; and this being so, Doctor Nordau was not a safe subject to be at large.  But the Assize of Public Opinion denied the petition, and the dear people bought the book at from three to five dollars a copy.  Printed in several languages, its sales have mounted to a hundred thousand volumes, and the author’s net profit is full forty thousand dollars.  No wonder is it that, with pockets full to bursting, Doctor Nordau goes out behind the house and laughs uproariously whenever he thinks of how he has worked the world!